Abstract:

The technological advancements in the last two decades allowed educators to use different technologies and apps in teaching children with autism. Mobile applications have been used to teach academic, communication, and social skills in research and they were found to be effective. The technology-aided instruction and interventions have been reported as an evidence-based practice in the National Clearinghouse on Autism Evidence and Practice report. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI)-supported mobile applications have also become widespread, and AI has great potential in facilitating the lives of typically developing individuals as well as individuals with autism. YanYana is an example of an AI-supported mobile application that is specially designed and developed for individuals with autism. With this in mind, it might be worth looking into the effects of such technology in teaching children with autism. This has the potential of opening up a new chapter for technology-aided instruction and intervention in autism.
The purpose of this study is to measure the effectiveness of an iPad-based, AI-supported mobile application, YanYana, on the following instructions and responding skills of four children with autism aged between 3-7-year-old. Specifically, the following instruction skills will include instructions like ‘’Say hi’’ and ‘’High five’’. The responding skills to be examined will include questions such as ‘’What is your name?’’, and ‘’Where are you from?’’. A multiple-probe across-participant single-case experimental design will be used to examine the effects of YanYana on teaching following instructions and responding skills of children with autism. In this research, the instructions and questions will be presented to children with autism through the cartoon characters in YanYana. The app will recognize correct and incorrect verbal and physical responses of children by using natural language processing and motion detection features. It will also provide verbal reinforcements such as ‘’Good job!’’ when a child follows the given instructions or answers the questions correctly. When the child does not answer the question or follow the instruction correctly, YanYana will use verbal prompts to teach the correct response and will make error corrections. If a child does not follow the instructions or respond to questions correctly three times out of three opportunities presented, YanYana will automatically skip the targeted questions or instruction and would present a different set of target behavior to the child. When all of the targeted instruction and question sets are repeated, the intervention will end and the child's performance in the intervention sessions will be reported to the researcher. This report will be in graphics for each skill targeted for each student and will be automatically created by YanYana. In addition to data collected in YanYana, all training sessions will be recorded and scored for treatment integrity and inter-observer reliability. The social validity survey will be used to collect data on participants, parents, and teachers’ thoughts about the acceptability, feasibility, and efficacy of the YanYana. The data will be presented as a graph and the results will be discussed in detail.

Keywords:

Autism, technology, artificial intelligence, iPad.