Abstract
The employment settings for autistic individuals in the USA is grim. As more children are diagnosed with ASD, the number of adolescent and young adult with ASD will increase as well over the next decade. Based on reports, one of the main challenges in securing and retaining employment for individual with ASD is difficulty in communicating and working with others in workplace settings. Most vocational trainings focused on technical skills development and very few addresses teamwork skills development. In this study, we present the design of a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) that support autistic individual to develop their teamwork skills by working together with a partner in a shared virtual space. This paper described the CVE architecture, teamwork-based tasks design and quantitative measures to evaluate teamwork skills. A system validation was also carried out to validate the system design. The results showed that our CVE was able to support multiple users in the same shared environment, the tasks were tolerable by users, and all the quantitative measures are recorded accordingly.
Note: We are using both identity-first and people-first language to respect both views by interchangeably using the term ‘autistic adults’ and ‘adults with autism’ [22].
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Dietz, P.M., Rose, C.E., McArthur, D., Maenner, M.: National and state estimates of adults with autism spectrum disorder. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 50(12), 4258–4266 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04494-4
Levy, A., Perry, A.: Outcomes in adolescents and adults with autism: a review of the literature. Res. Autism Spectr. Disord. 5(4), 1271–1282 (2011)
U.S. Bureau of labor statistics
Brooke, V., et al.: Employees with autism spectrum disorder achieving long-term employment success: a retrospective review of employment retention and intervention. Res. Pract. Pers. Severe Disabil. 43(3), 181–193 (2018)
Hendricks, D.: Employment and adults with autism spectrum disorders: challenges and strategies for success. J. Vocat. Rehabil. 32(2), 125–134 (2010)
Taylor, J., Seltzer, M.: Employment and post-secondary educational activities for young adults with autism spectrum disorders during the transition to adulthood. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 41, 566–574 (2011)
Walsh, L., Lydon, S., Healy, O.: Employment and vocational skills among individuals with autism spectrum disorder: predictors, impact, and interventions. Rev. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 1, 266–275 (2014)
Stauch, T.A., Plavnick, J.B.: Teaching vocational and social skills to adolescents with autism using video modeling. Educ. Treat. Child. 43, 137–151 (2020)
Checa, D., Bustillo, A.: A review of immersive virtual reality serious games to enhance learning and training. Multimed. Tools Appl. 79(9–10), 5501–5527 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-08348-9
Norris, M.W., Spicer, K., Byrd, T.: Virtual reality: the new pathway for effective safety training. Prof. Saf. 64(06), 36–39 (2019)
Zhang, L., Warren, Z., Swanson, A., Weitlauf, A., Sarkar, N.: Understanding performance and verbal-communication of children with ASD in a collaborative virtual environment. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 48(8), 2779–2789 (2018)
Bozgeyikli, L., et al.: VR4VR: vocational rehabilitation of individuals with disabilities in immersive virtual reality environments. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments, pp. 1–4, July 2015
Stichter, J.P., Laffey, J., Galyen, K., Herzog, M.: iSocial: delivering the social competence intervention for adolescents (SCI-A) in a 3D virtual learning environment for youth with high functioning autism. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 44(2), 417–430 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-013-1881-0
Zhang, L., Fu, Q., Swanson, A., Weitlauf, A., Warren, Z., Sarkar, N.: Design and evaluation of a collaborative virtual environment (CoMove) for autism spectrum disorder intervention. ACM Trans. Access. Comput. 11(2), Article 11 (2018)
Glaser, N.J., Schmidt, M.: Usage considerations of 3D collaborative virtual learning environments to promote development and transfer of knowledge and skills for individuals with autism. Technol. Knowl. Learn. 25(2), 315–322 (2020)
https://dissonance.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Basics/Quick-Start-Mirror.html
Kenny, L., Hattersley, C., Molins, B., Buckley, C., Povey, C., Pellicano, E.: Which terms should be used to describe autism? Perspectives from the UK autism community. Autism 20(4), 442–462 (2016)
Acknowledgement
We are grateful for the support provided by NSF grants 1936970 and 2033413 for this research. The authors are solely responsible for the contents and opinions expressed in this manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Amat, A.Z. et al. (2021). Collaborative Virtual Environment to Encourage Teamwork in Autistic Adults in Workplace Settings. In: Antona, M., Stephanidis, C. (eds) Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Design Methods and User Experience. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12768. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78092-0_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78092-0_22
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-78091-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-78092-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)