scholarly journals Effectiveness of Virtual Reality for Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Evidence-Based Systematic Review

Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (8) ◽  
pp. 2486 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Mesa-Gresa ◽  
Hermenegildo Gil-Gómez ◽  
José-Antonio Lozano-Quilis ◽  
José-Antonio Gil-Gómez

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disease that is specially characterized by impairments in social communication and social skills. ASD has a high prevalence in children, affecting 1 in 160 subjects. Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as an effective tool for intervention in the health field. Different recent papers have reviewed the VR-based treatments in ASD, but they have an important limitation because they only use clinical databases and do not include important technical indexes such as the Web of Science index or the Scimago Journal & Country Rank. To our knowledge, this is the first contribution that has carried out an evidence-based systematic review including both clinical and technical databases about the effectiveness of VR-based intervention in ASD. The initial search identified a total of 450 records. After the exclusion of the papers that are not studies, duplicated articles, and the screening of the abstract and full text, 31 articles met the PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparison and Outcomes) criteria and were selected for analysis. The studies examined suggest moderate evidence about the effectiveness of VR-based treatments in ASD. VR can add many advantages to the treatment of ASD symptomatology, but it is necessary to develop consistent validations in future studies to state that VR can effectively complement the traditional treatments.

Author(s):  
Elaine Thai ◽  
Dan Nathan-Roberts

A systematic review of virtual reality (VR) systems for individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is detailed. The aim of this proceeding is to determine which social skills focuses are most important and how their potential improvements should be measured. Following the PRISMA guidelines, 48 articles were identified, and a total of 12 articles that met the a priori criteria were given full review. All 12 studies aimed to train some social skill, but there was no agreement among which single theme was most essential. The ones that received the most attention were facial expression and emotion recognition, appropriate behaviors and responses, and initiating social interactions. Only 9 studies used direct measures to assess changes made as a result of the VR systems. The ones most commonly used were subjective measures and participants’ body movements and gestures. The collective impacts and limitations of the studies are presented, as well as implications for future work.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 890-902
Author(s):  
Lynn Kern Koegel ◽  
Katherine M. Bryan ◽  
Pumpki Lei Su ◽  
Mohini Vaidya ◽  
Stephen Camarata

Purpose The purpose of this systematic review was to identify parent education procedures implemented in intervention studies focused on expressive verbal communication for nonverbal (NV) or minimally verbal (MV) children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Parent education has been shown to be an essential component in the habilitation of individuals with ASD. Parents of individuals with ASD who are NV or MV may particularly benefit from parent education in order to provide opportunities for communication and to support their children across the life span. Method ProQuest databases were searched between the years of 1960 and 2018 to identify articles that targeted verbal communication in MV and NV individuals with ASD. A total of 1,231 were evaluated to assess whether parent education was implemented. We found 36 studies that included a parent education component. These were reviewed with regard to (a) the number of participants and participants' ages, (b) the parent education program provided, (c) the format of the parent education, (d) the duration of the parent education, (e) the measurement of parent education, and (f) the parent fidelity of implementation scores. Results The results of this analysis showed that very few studies have included a parent education component, descriptions of the parent education programs are unclear in most studies, and few studies have scored the parents' implementation of the intervention. Conclusions Currently, there is great variability in parent education programs in regard to participant age, hours provided, fidelity of implementation, format of parent education, and type of treatment used. Suggestions are made to provide both a more comprehensive description and consistent measurement of parent education programs.


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 454-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francielly Mourao Gasparotto ◽  
Francislaine Aparecida dos Reis Lívero ◽  
Sara Emilia Lima Tolouei Menegati ◽  
Arquimedes Gasparotto Junior

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