Feel and touch: a haptic mobile game to assess tactile processing

Abstract

Haptic interfaces have great potential for assessing the tactile processing of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), an area that has been under-explored due to the lack of tools to assess it. Until now, haptic interfaces for children have mostly been used as a teaching or therapeutic tool, so there are still open questions about how they could be used to assess tactile processing of children with ASD. This article presents the design process that led to the development of Feel and Touch, a mobile game augmented with vibrotactile stimuli to assess tactile processing. Our feasibility evaluation, with 5 children from 3 to 6 years old, shows that children accept vibrations and are able to use the proposed vibrotactile patterns. However, it is still necessary to work on the instructions to make the game dynamic clearer and rewards to keep the attention of children. We close this article by discussing future work and conclusions.