Interactive Technologies for Autism

Development, deployment, and evaluation of interactive technologies for individuals with autism have been rapidly increasing over the last decade. There is great promise for the use of these types of technologies to enrich interventions, facilitate communication, and support data collection. Emerging technologies in this area also have the potential to enhance assessment and diagnosis of individuals with autism, to understand the nature of autism, and to help researchers conduct basic and applied research. This book provides an in-depth review of the historical and state-of-the-art use of technology by and for individuals with autism. The intention is to give readers a comprehensive background in order to understand what has been done and what promises and challenges lie ahead. By providing a classification scheme and general review, this book can also help technology designers and researchers better understand what technologies have been successful, what problems remain open, and where innovations can further address challenges and opportunities for individuals with autism and the variety of stakeholders connected to them.

Dr. Julie A. Kientz is a Professor at the University of Washington in the department of Human Centered Design and Engineering, with adjunct appointments in Computer Science and the Information School. She has worked in the space of autism and technology for the last 15 years, as well as the more general area of technologies for health, education, and families. Her background is in Computer Science, and thus she comes to this area from the perspective of a technologist, but she has had a focus in human-centered design and works to bring the perspective of end users and other stakeholders in the design of novel technologies. Her primary experience in this area has been in the development and evaluation of four technologies for individuals with autism and their caregivers. The first, Abaris, was a tool that used digital pen technology and voice recognition to help therapists and teachers conducting discrete trial training therapy become more efficient and reflective of the data they collect. The second, Baby Steps, is a long-term project looking at using a variety of software, Web, mobile, and social media technologies to engage parents of young children to identify early warning signs of developmental delay, including autism. The most recent project, led by her former Ph.D. student Kiley Sobel, was Incloodle, a shared tablet-based picture-taking application for kindergar-teners to promote inclusive play and teach social-emotional understanding of neurodiversity be-tween neurodiverse children and their peers. Dr. Kientz received a National Science Foundation CAREER award for her work on using technology to track developmental milestones in young children and was named an MIT Technology Review Top Innovator Under 35. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008.Dr. Matthew S. Goodwin is an Interdisciplinary Associate Professor with tenure at Northeastern University jointly appointed in the Bouve College of Health Sciences and the Khoury College of Computer and Information Sciences, where he is a founding member of a new doc-toral program in Personal Health Informatics and directs the Computational Behavioral Science Laboratory. Goodwin is also a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and was previously an Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University (2008–2018) and Director of Clinical Research at the MIT Media Lab (2008–2011). He has previously served on the Executive Board of the International Society for Autism Research and the Scientific Advisory Board for Autism Speaks. He has over 25 years of research and clinical experience working with children and adults on the autism spectrum and developing and evaluating innovative technologies for behavioral assessment and intervention, including video and audio capture, telemetric physiological monitors, accelerometry sensors, and digital video/facial recognition systems. Goodwin has received several honors, including a dissertation award from the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology, Peter Merenda Prize in Statistics and Research Methodology from the University of Rhode Island, Hariri Award for Transformative Computational Science, named an Aspen Ideas Scholar by the Aspen Institute, and a career contribution award from the Princeton Autism Lecture Series. He has obtained research funding from a variety of sources, including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Department of Defense, Simons Foundation, Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation, and Autism Speaks. Goodwin received his B.A. in psychology from Wheaton College and his M.A. and Ph.D., both in experimental psychology and behavioral science, from the University of Rhode Island. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Affective Computing in the MIT Media Lab in 2010.
Dr. Gillian R. Hayes is the Robert A.and Barbara L. Kleist Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, in the Depart-ment of Informatics in the School of Information and Computer Sciences, in the Department of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine, and in the School of Education. She is the Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Dean of the Graduate Division at UC Irvine. She is an alumna of Vanderbilt University (B.S., 1999) and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 2007). For nearly two decades, her research has focused on designing, developing, and evaluating technologies in sup-port of vulnerable populations, including those with autism. Building on a background in computer and a consulting career before academia, she focuses on methods for including people not traditionally represented in the design process or in research. She received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation in 2008 for her work on mobile technologies for children and families coping with chronic illness and neurodevelopmental disabilities. Her most recent work has focused on both augmented reality and virtual worlds in collaboration with former students and post-doctoral scholars, Dr. Lou Anne Boyd, Dr. Franceli Cibriani, Dr. Kathryn Ringland, and Dr. Monica Tentori. She has had the privelege of working with a variety of students and researchers with disabilities. She is also the co-founder of Tiwahe Technology, a technology services firm focused on classroom-based and transition technologies for schools. Following in the footsteps of Dr. Abowd, co-author on this book, Dr. Hayes received the CHI Social Impact Award in 2019 for her work supporting community-based engaged research, including work with partners in autism re-search and treatment.
Dr. Gregory D. Abowd is a Regents’ and Distinguished Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Tech-nology. He is the father of two boys, Aidan and Blaise, who have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum. Since the early 2000s, he has de-voted a large portion of his research career to developing technologies addressing challenges related to autism. He advised, and was subsequently inspired by, the doctoral research of Gillian Hayes and Julie Kientz, two of the coauthors of this book, and has advised numerous doctoral students on topics in this area, ranging from direct interventions to tools for clinicians, educators, or researchers to use in screening, diagnosis, and assessment of interventions. He is the Chief Research Officer of Behavior Imaging Solutions, which has commercialized some of the thesis research of the CareLog system designed and evaluated by Gillian Hayes and is currently pursuing commercialization of a portable in-home behavior capture system that is the thesis research of current Ph.D. student Nazneen. Gregory served on the Innovative Technologies for Autism Committee with Matthew Goodwin that was first part of the Cure Autism Now Foundation and has continued under theauspices of Autism Speaks. In 1998, he founded the Atlanta Autism Consortium to unite different stakeholder communities within the Atlanta area focused on research, education, and advocacy, and he now serves as the president of that non-profit organization. He has published extensively in the area of technology and autism and has received several professional awards from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) in recognition of that work, including being selected as a Fellow of the ACM.