Design And Application Of The Training System For Children With Autism Based On Virtual Reality

According to statistics,there are more than 200 million children with autism in China,which is growing at a rate of nearly 200 thousand a year.At present,there is no cure for autism and only rely on interventions to improve the quality of life.However,due to the characteristics of autism,acquiring new skills requires a lot of repetitive training.The traditional manual intervention training method takes a long time with poor effect,requires a lot of manpower and material resources to support,and cannot reproduce realistic skills training scenarios repeatedly.Virtual reality technology has the characteristics of high fidelity,low cost of reappearance,and strong repeatability.It can provide realistic training for children with autism,and has strong customization and low cost,which reduces manpower and material costs greatly.However,there is no mature research on the use of virtual reality technology in the intervention training for children with autism in China.Foreign research is also limited to simple primary skills training and lack of scientific training methods.Based on this situation,we have developed a training system for children with autism based on virtual reality,and designed three training courses for fire escape,bus travel,and supermarket shopping for the most difficult life skills in the process of manual intervention.The system not only adds a somatosensory device to achieve a natural interactive process based on realistic scenario simulation for reducing the difficulty of operation and real-time migration.It also incorporates Pivotal Response Treatment(PRT)in the intervention of autism and adopts a step-by-step,difficulty-based training approach for optimizing the training process and improving training efficiency.In order to verify the validity of the system,three children with autism were selected from local special education institutions to carry out a training experiment lasting for two semesters on bus riding skills.The results show that the ability of bus riding for three children has been improved effectively by the training of system,they can complete the entire process of bus riding successfully,and some problems such as sensitivity to the noise of bus and fixed routes have also been solved effectively.Furthermore,the abilities implicit in the training process such as recognizing numbers and obeying rules have also been trained effectively,an additional social effect has exerted.