I'm going to present our paper on recommending games to adults with autism for social-skill enhancement. This paper is co-authored by me and Alisha Banskota
What is autism? Autism is a disorder that affects people's social behavioral and communication skills.
Back to the year of 2018
There is a statistical report which showed that in the United States every two out of 100 children are diagnosed with autism.
And as these children get order every year and become adults there are about 50 thousands of them
As these teenagers with autism move into their adulthood, it is a significant figure
These individuals with autism are highly interesting in playing video games as shown in different studies.
These video games have positive impacts on these people, mainly because playing games is entertaining and also relaxing. Furthermore,
Statistical figures have shown that
children and adult with autism spend more than two hours a day playing video games and in fact 64% of young adults with autism
Spend a few hours in paying games on social media websites on a regular basis.
Because of these we
have recognized that using game playing as a way to enhance adults with autism's
social interactive skills is a way to go. For this reason, we involve in this particular project and
hopefully, using
game playing we can
Enhance the social-interactive skills of adults with autism.
Now,
We teamed up with ScenicView Academy, which is a local school
That teaches adults with autism, and we have investigated five different social interactive skill areas.
These areas include developing audio communication skills.
Engaging in
Speech therapies, recognizing facial expression, showing empathy and also maintaining eye contact. After nailing down these five skill areas that we would like to work on
We have developed different entertaining and educational games in each area for adults to play
With the ultimate goal that we can improve their social interactive skills.
After we have developed a number of games for the adult with autism to play, we consider the next step, which is recommanding the developed games and prioritizing them so that the one that
Meet the interests of the user is the one that should be considered for recomendation. First of all, we require that each user of our system to create a user profile.
Which includes a number of games that they've enjoyed playing in the past. we considered the VideoGameGeek website games mainly because VideoGameGeek is a social medium media site.
That allows its users to post games that they enjoy playing and also have meta data about these games. It's a requirement that a user of our system.
To provide the top 10
Video games that they have enjoyed playing in the past and we compare the game that these users enjoyed paying with the game that we have developed
And try to match them. If the attribute values of the game that posted under the user profile match
the ones of the games that we have developed, then we can recommend the ones that best-match the interests of
The user to play the games. Using the recommended games, we evaluate whether the user has improved the social skill in a particular area and then determine whether the user should continue paying games in that area or they can move on to another area.
Shown over here is a snap screen shot of the games that we have developed and each of these games was developed for either one or more areas for the users to play.
Before the user plays any game, we require that the user answers the questions in a questionnaire. There are 34 different questions in the questionnaire. Each of these question is extracted from reliable Autism sources.
and we have required each user
To answer all the 34 questions. Each user provides a ranking, from one to seven, to determine whether the user has a particular
weakness area. Based on the rating provided to each question that is related to a particular weakness area, we determine the deficiency social skill area, and expect the user to pay the games in that area.
So that they can have a chance to enhance their social skill in that area. First of all, we determine the weakness area based on the answers to the questions the user filled out. And we isolate the area that the user has to deal with. And we provide the ranking on
the games that we have developed for that area and rank them. We rank these games in the order from the highest to lowest priority.
Each one of these games is recommended to the user in different areas.
After the user has played a games over a month or two, we determine whether they the user has made improvement. We have considered four different attribute values of each games to prioritize them and rank them accordingly.
There are four different attributes to consider for prioritize different games, we consider the first which is the theme or sometimes we call category.
Each category consists of a number of keywords associated with it and there are altogether 70 categories of games posted under VideoGameGeek and we consider how good the matched categories of the VideoGameGeek games with that of the theraputic games considered for recommendation.
We compare our games matched up with the categories of the ones provided by the user.
Then we determine whether the category of theraputic game matches catheories of the games the user likely interested in playing.
The second attribute values that we consider is
The number of prayers of a game. Every game has a different number of suggested players who participate. Some game is a single-user game. Some games are multiple-user games.
And we consider games with different numbers of players that the user included in the user profile and analyze each of the games.
We assigned the number of prayers in our therapeutic games and try to match these games with the numbers of prayers in the games
specified in the user profile. The therapeutic game that best matches the number of players in the user's games
is considered the highly matched games
The third attribute value that we consider is topic, which is sometimes called subject area. Topic is described by using different keywords and altogether we consider twenty-seven
Subject areas which are determined by the LDA model that we developed and if the subject areas
of those games posted by the user in the user profile match the ones specified in a therapeutic game, then we say that it is a good match and the therapeutic game is given a good ranking.
Under the videoGameGeek website, each of the games is assign an average rating and based on these ratings, we can tell how popular a particular game is.
For the games that are posted under the user profile we compare their ratings with the predicted ratings of the games that we have developed
In order to consider the predicted rating,
We have to consider the genres assigned to different games. If the genres of a therapeutic games and the genres of a game posted under a user profile matched, then
we can consider using the average rating of the game to be the predicted rating of the therapeutic game.
Note that the predicted rating is based on the collaborative filtering approach. Now after we have come up with all the
ratings for different games. Then we combine
The four different ratings into one so that for each particular therapeutic game there is
A single rating which dictates which particular therapeutic game to be recommended to the user for a particular
Weakness areas. In order to do this we use the CombMNZ model to combine the four different ratings of a particular game into a single one. Besides using the
Game features to determine games to be recommended to the users we consider an automated approach, which is strictly based on the assumption that
If a particular new user's interest, based on the games that they have played in the past, match the interests of the former users who have played therapeutic games, then it is a good match between them.
In addition, if the new user's areas of deficiency also match up well with the areas of these former users, then we can recommend games the former users played to the new user so that we can automate the process of game recommendation.
In regarding the experimental results, we have recruited students from ScenicView Academy
as participants of our empirical study. Altogether there 78 participants out of which 65 were assigned to the test group and the remaining 13 of them were assigned it to the control group, and all these
participates involved in this study had filled out a questionnaire, but for Test group people not only they filled out the questionnaire. They also played games.
The empirical study has shown that the participants in the Test group made improvement in different deficiency areas and they have
Overcome some of the weakness areas. For the Control group who did not play games, they didn't make any progress at all as the statistical studies had shown that
over an 8-month period, which have been verified.
This slide also show the deficiency that the students struggled with, as it turned out, recognizing facial expression is one of those areas that students struggled with, and we also break down the
Different area of weaknesses based on the genders of the students. In conclusion, I would like to
mention that we have developed different therapeutic games and recommended these games to adults with autism based on their weakness areas.
We have verified the effectiveness of our system through an empircial study. Our research work contributes to adults with autism, and our the goal is to help these people to live an independent, productive, and fulfilling life. That concludes my presentation. Thank you.