Augmented reality to Social and Emotional Learning for people with Intellectual Disability

Herrero-Huerta, M., Gonzalez-Aguilera, D., Whelan, P. F. (2015) "Augmented reality to Social and Emotional Learning for people with Intellectual Disability". Technical report (Dublin City University)

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships and make responsible decisions.

People with intellectual disability (ID) have delayed social and emotional skills, being a potential risk factor, generally commensurate with other areas of their development and behaviour. Thus, interventions to improve these skills may provide an avenue to encourage the mental health and wellbeing of this population. ASELID (Augmented reality to Social and Emotional Learning for people with Intellectual Disability) proposal faces with this condition, consisting of creating an assistive tool based on augmented reality and gaming sensors to support social and emotional learning for people with ID.

The purpose is to improve social and emotional skills by applying evaluation strategies for Behavioural Analysis (BA) and simultaneously, aiding caregivers and psychologists to create, monitor and analyse this learning process thanks to different fundamental aspects: a) the possibility for the users to professionally perform the prescribed exercises without the presence of medical personnel b) monitoring the continuous progress in the learning curve and reinforced learning in real time and c) automatic adaptation of the learning to the user through machine learning techniques.

To the best of our knowledge, no research has been done to quantify the social and emotional learning process for continuous evaluation and automated reinforced learning. Thereby, the proposed system will improve independent living aspects by using innovative valid forms of evaluation. Moreover, the system will allow us to advance towards personalized assistance and evaluation according to user needs.