How do sensory features of places impact on spatial exploration of people with autism? A user study

Abstract

Autism is characterized by peculiar sensory processing. The sensory features of a place may have a crucial impact on the decision a person with autism makes when choosing what to visit in a tourist experience. We present a map-based mobile app, conceived for people with mid to high-functioning autism, which exploits sensory features of places to filter the information displayed and suggest locations that may be suitable for their idiosyncratic needs. The mobile app also exploits the crowdmapping paradigm in order to gather these features from the community of users, since they are not publicly available. We describe the results of a composite user evaluation of the app, made up of a task experiment, a field study, and an online questionnaire, which aims to understand (i) whether the explicit presentation of sensory information impacts the decision of going to a specific place, (ii) if the crowdmapping functionality is used and how and (iii) how people with autism navigate the mobile app. The results confirm the importance of the sensory features for people with autism in the decision to go to a specific place. Moreover, they show that crowdmapping may be a good solution to collect such features, but should be integrated with other methods. Finally, the results show that the preferred modality of exploring information about places is by using the map.