An Intelligent System to Support Social Storytelling for People with ASD

The number of diagnoses of ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) is growing every day. Children suffering from ASD lack of social behaviors, which strongly impacts on the inclusion of the child and his/her own family in the community. Much scientific evidence shows that social storytelling is a valuable tool for developing pro-social behaviors in children with ASD and for articulating their emotional language, empathy, and expressive and verbal communication. To be effective, social stories should be customized for the target user since there exist different levels of ASD. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes an application that supports the semiautomatic creation of social stories. The intelligent system learns the needs of the target user over time and adapts by creating social stories tailored to the ASD level of the disorder. The editor lets non-expert caregivers select the appropriate elements and content representations to be included in the social stories.