Autistic Innovative Assistant (AIA): an Android application for Arabic autism children

Abstract

ABSTRACT Most autism centers in Arabic countries rely on manual techniques in teaching children the basics of language, math, and social skills. Actually, these techniques may be limited in measuring the child’s progress in a systematic way considering different fields. To overcome these limitations, we developed Autistic Innovative Assistant (AIA) which is an Android smartphone app that is dedicated to teach Arabic autistic children the necessary linguistic and mathematical basics in addition to improving their social skills through creating an interactive learning environment. The proposed app covers five main categories with an interactive quiz, included in each, as an assessment tool. The lessons included in each category are viewed as a series of colorful pictures with a written sentence and an audio message to describe the meaning of each, thereby attracting the child’s attention and making learning a fun activity. Each child’s supervisor can access his/her quizzes’ records, measure the child’s progress in different categories, and use the related recommendation reports to adjust the app usage pattern. AIA was tested by a group of autistic children for a one-month test period in a real life environment represented in “Jordan Specialized Center for Autism” and the results and feedback were very promising.