ICT Based Learning Solutions for Children with ASD: A Requirement Engineering Study

Abstract

"This research explores the explicit requirements to design and develop ICTbased learning solutions for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). A requirement elicitation study has been conducted for six weeks of the study’s in Pune, India. The study sample size is fifteen (N=15), with an age limit between five to twelve years old. All the participants have been diagnosed with ASD and undergoing a skills development process in the same institution for at least six months. The outcomes of this research are tri-fold. Firstly, identify the twelve explicit requirements to design and develop ICT-based learning solutions considering the challenges due to autism. Secondly, conformity to the existing Multi Agent based Persuasive Education (MAPE) model with revealed requirements. Thirdly, propose an Internet of Things (IoT) based framework to observe and record the learning performance of ASD-affected children. The unique contribution of this study is to develop a Level-5 IoT framework to incorporate the requirements revealed through the participatory design approach for implementing ICT-based learning solutions. The proposed framework forms the basis for developing a dataset to identify the learning patterns and new requirements for ASD-affected children through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)."