Personalized Design of Stress Interfaces in Autism

We have built a computer system where people can build an animation of their choice just by describing it. The animation can then be hooked up to a wearable sensor measuring stress, so that instead of watching a line graph, the wearer can watch their stress affect the animation (i.e. if they build a train, the train moves faster as they get more stressed). We are conducting a focus group to show some of the potential animations and how they work, and discuss your ideas about this system (how would YOU use it, what do you think about it, etc.)

Adults with autism, Level 1 diagnosis.

Participants will log on to a Zoom session with up to 4 participants and 1 or 2 experimenters. They will be shown a few examples of our system and asked a series of questions. No video will be allowed or recorded, only audio. The session will last approximately 1/2 hour. We are interested in impressions and opinions about our system.

In the future, we will be conducting an intervention with adults with autism to see if we can improve interoception (in particular, the ability to sense the internal feeling of stress), using this interface and a wearable device. We first want to understand users’ impressions of the interface before we conduct that study.