Kinect: Autistic Children respond to Kinect!?

Some questions have come up around the use of Kinect and Autistic children, as usual any good questions are fuel for my blog!

Bear in mind I don’t have children, and only deal with Computer Science students and professors as well as fellow team members and managers at Microsoft. 

But the question comes up:

Can Kinect help Autistic Children to learn social skills? 

• My immediate answer would be:
  • That needs to be decided by people wiser and more patient than me.  However, I can do some research and answer the following questions:
• What about research opportunities?
  • If you are looking for a research thesis, then consider this as an avenue for some worthwhile NUI research!

Has Microsoft or other institution accomplished research that would demonstrate the value of XBOX/Kinect with Special Ed classrooms?

• I have found no peered review papers on this, but with the newness of Kinect that would not be unusual.
• My thoughts:
  • There is Kinectimals, and from my reading some classes of children diagnosed as autistic respond to animals

Research presentations

• Avatar-Facilitated Therapy and Virtual Worlds: Next-Generation Tools for Physical Rehabilitation, Psychiatry, and Behavioral Medicine
  • One of the research teams is at Stanford University, Professor: Walter Greenleaf, who is funded by Microsoft Corporation
• Social Use of Computer-Mediated Communication by Adults on the Autism Spectrum
  • No Kinect, interesting article

Are there commercially available titles that would help autistic children to connect and interact, etc.?

From my limited experience with people who have autism, they seem to have a good affinity with animals, so Kinectimals might be one place to start. As to curriculum, rubrics, etc. I have been able to find the following (you may need to log in using a liveID to see):

· Kinect Adventures and Kinect Sports in the Classroom

· My thoughts:

• • I would take a look at that material, it might be possible to customize the material for the issue that children with the different view of the world that we call autism might be able to use some of this approach.
  • Certainly so called high functioning autistic students could use this approach for arithmetic, etc.

How might a school district extend XBOX/Kinect communication from one Special Day Classroom in the district to another Special Day Classroom school in another part of the school district?

• This is a cool idea, there are many connected projects in play with the Research Kinect SDK