Many children who have autism have a great deal of difficulty decoding and understanding social cues. Learning how to understand a facial expression or tone of voice often requires a lot of practice. The Center for BrainHealth in Dallas has been using digital avatars to help autistic children improve their social skills.
In our society, it is very important to have adequate social skills. A lot of the communication we do as humans is non-verbal. Our facial expressions change to indicate what emotion we are feeling. The same sentence can mean completely different things depending on what tone of voice the words are spoken with. In order to make friends with someone else, you need to feel some kind of connection to that person, and those connections are often made through the telling of jokes, or the expression of empathy.
Job interviews require face to face interaction between an employer and a potential employee. Although a lot of information can be gleaned from the resume that a job applicant hands to the interviewer, a big part of a job interview involves a “gut reaction” that the employer has about the person who is hoping to be hired. An autistic person who has difficulty understanding the facial expression or tone of voice of the job interviewer is going to have a much harder time finding a job than a person who excels at social skills. In order to be a self sufficient adult, children who have autism are going to need plenty of opportunity to practice their social skills.
Technology is an amazing thing. Think for a moment about all the different ways that it is possible to communicate with someone else through the internet. We send email, and comment on the Facebook status updates of our friends. People can tweet their every thought to thousands of followers on Twitter, and can send individual text messages to their closest friends. Skype can be used to talk with someone who is far away, and even has video capability, to allow people to see each other as they talk.
These are but a few of the pieces of technology that allow people to be social with one another. Considering this, it’s not that surprising that someone has found a way to use virtual avatars to help children who have autism to practice social skills. The Center for BrainHealth is located in Dallas, Texas. The child controls an avatar that can be moved through a virtual environment. With the guidance of a therapist, the child can explore a virtual world that is designed to function very similarly to how the real world works. This is a safe place for an autistic child to improve his or her social skills, without fear of what people may think if the child makes a social error.
Image by Betsy Weber on Flickr