MAAN: A MULTI-MODAL CHAT APPLICATION FOR ADULTS WITH AUTISM

Abstract

Modern social communication is becoming more technology enabled. However, most of these technology are not accessible by autistic adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Due to their issues in social and communication skills, they need special features that can help verbal and non-verbal individuals to use a messaging application. Since 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide and especially in Qatar have affect the social and communication skills of autistic adults and they were using the default methods such as video conferencing and messaging with parents. The need of a messaging application that helps autistic adults to communicate is a must to include them in the social network messaging world that is spreading so fast. This study investigate a new developed messaging application named MAAN including additional features from existing applications: Text-to-Speech, Speech-to-Text, and TAWASOL Symbols. This study aims to investigate the two hypothesis: “The usage of Text-to-Speech, Speech-To-Text, and Communication symbols can enhance the social and communication skills of the autistic adults” and “The usage of the application can ease the communication of autistic adults with others”. We followed an experimental method used to evaluate the effectiveness of the application and the user study followed a mixed-method approach, mainly a quantitative approach aiming to enhance and develop the social and communication skills of autistic adults. Then it is followed by qualitative perceptions generated from the user’s post-study interviews to discuss the quantitative results in-depth and produce contextual real-world knowledge about the behaviors and social structures of the participants. We distributed pre-study SELSA – S questionnaire and demographic questionnaire to gather participants’ data. Then, the participants start messaging a selected non-autistic user (parents/caregivers or a friend) or specialist. Weekly usage of the application feature by each participant and the weekly usage were collected from Google Firebase. The experiment took 16 weeks of application usage. After the experiment was complete, we distributed the post-study SELSA – S questionnaire and we conducted a semi-structured interviews with participants (parents/caregivers) to discuss the autistic adults’ experience with the application in general and its features in particular and gather their feedback. Also, we conducted another semi-structured interviews with specialists from the study to get insights into their suggestions and experience with the application. Findings have shown great user engagement levels with the application and positive feedback. Generally, users thought that the application is interesting, where they discuss the novelty (10%) of the application in the semi-structured post-study interviews and most of them discussed its advantage for their autistic adults (65%). The SELSA – S questionnaire showed no change in family loneliness scale, howerver, it showed that the users who use the application’s features more have higher rate to enhance their social and communication skills based on social loneliness scale from the questionnaire. In conclusion, this study allowed us to understand the need of the autism society to a messaging application similar to MAAN application. It can also prepare the autistic adults for the independent living in our future ultimate goal. The results were promising and showed the importance of MAAN application and the need to update it based on the proposed suggestion to take place in the international platforms for autism society.

Date of Award	2021
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	HBKU College of Science and Engineering