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ProCom: Designing and Evaluating a Mobile and Wearable System to Support Proximity Awareness for People with Autism

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History
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    People with autism are at risk for social isolation due to differences in their perception and engagement with the social world. In this work, we aim to address one specific concern related to socialization the understanding, awareness, and use of interpersonal space. Over the course of a year, we iteratively designed and tested a series of concepts for supporting children with autism in perceiving, understanding, and responding to physical proximity with other people. During this process, we developed ProCom, a prototype system for measuring proximity without requiring instrumentation of the environment or another person. We used a variety of low and high fidelity prototypes, culminating in ProCom, to assess the feasibility, utility, and challenges of this approach. The results of these iterative design engagements indicate that wearable assistive technologies can support people in developing awareness of physical proximity in social settings. However, challenges related to both personal and collective use remain

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
        May 2017
        7138 pages
        ISBN:9781450346559
        DOI:10.1145/3025453
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        Published: 02 May 2017

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        1. autism
        2. children
        3. parallel design
        4. proximity
        5. self-monitoring
        6. social skills
        7. wearable computing

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        • Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission
        • Natural Science Foundation of China

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        CHI '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 600 of 2,400 submissions, 25%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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        • (2024)Technologies Across the Disciplines for Autistic UsersThe Sensory Accommodation Framework for Technology10.1007/978-3-031-48843-6_2(13-26)Online publication date: 2-Jan-2024
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