Serious Games for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) prevalence rates are increasing and serious games have shown a valuable potential to aid the treatment of autistic individuals. Hence, a Systematic Literature Review was conducted aiming at categorizing serious games for ASD children regarding which skills they aim to develop, how their activities were operationalized, and which customization options they provide to users. Our results showed that a large number of serious games aimed at developing distinct skills in ASD children have been proposed, with their main focus being on social and socio-emotional skills. Nonetheless, for each skill we characterize the existing games according to their features, that is the platform they are developed for, I/O devices used, required users’ action, audiovisual elements, and number of players. We also identify strategies adopted in the games regarding specific features and skills that emerged from the analysis. Finally, our results highlight that offering broader customization options in the games could expand their applicability and utility to their users. This work provides a thorough examination of research on games for ASD children, contributing both to researchers interested in the topic, by identifying existing contributions and open issues for research, and to professionals interested in developing serious games for this public.

Keywords:

• Autism spectrum disorder
• serious games

Acknowledgements

Authors thank the Innovation Center on Artificial Intelligence for Health (CIIA-Saúde); and Analytical Capabilities Program (MPMG) for their partial support to this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org

2 https://dl.acm.org

3 https://www.segah.org

4 https://www.journals.elsevier.com/entertainment-computing

5 SBIE and JIS are not indexed in IEEE Xplore or the ACM Digital Library. SBGames has some tracks and years indexed in IEEE, but not all. SBSC has some years indexed in IEEE or ACM, but not all. Other relevant Brazilian events such as IHC (Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems) and WebMedia (Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and Web) were not explicitly included as their Proceedings have been regularly published in the ACM/DL since before 2010.

6 https://www.sbgames.org

7 http://comissoes.sbc.org.br/ce-sc/sbsc

8 http://ojs.sector3.com.br/index.php/sbie/issue/archive

9 https://sol.sbc.org.br/journals/index.php/jis

Additional information

Funding

This project was partially funded by the National Council of Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) under Grant [158320/2019-0], Coordenação de Aperfeiç oamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) under grant number 88882.348193/2019-01.

Notes on contributors

Ana Paula de Carvalho

Ana Paula de Carvalho is a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Computer Science of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). She received her master’s degree in Computer Science from the Federal University of Minas Gerais in 2013. Her research interests include human–computer interaction and databases.

Camila S. Braz

Camila S. Braz is an Electrical Engineering student of the Federal University of Minas Gerais. She has participated in several projects related to research and computing. Nowadays, she works as a data analyst and her research interests include human–computer interaction, machine learning and data analysis and visualization.

Sibele M. dos Santos

Sibele M. dos Santos is an Occupational Therapist with large experience in treating children with learning disabilities in her private practice, which includes Autistic Spectrum Disorders. Graduated in 1996 from UFMG having also had training in Sensory Integration Theory from University of Southern California and Neurodevelopment therapy (Bobath).

Renato A. C. Ferreira

Renato A. C. Ferreira is a full professor in the Computer Science Department at UFMG. He has extensive experience working with high performance and data intensive medical applications, having over 100 published papers. Obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland – College Park in 2001.

Raquel O. Prates

Raquel O. Prates is a full professor in the Computer Science Department at UFMG and the coordinator of the Semiotic Engineering and Interaction Research Group (PENSi). She received her PhD in Informatics from PUC-Rio in 1998. Her research interests are mainly in HCI and Collaborative Systems.