Augmented Reality for Rehabilitation of Cognitive Disabled Children: A Preliminary Study

We have designed a non-immersive recreational and educational augmented reality application (ARVe - Augmented Reality applied to Vegetal field) that allows young children to handle 2D and 3D plant entities in a simple and intuitive way. This application involves a task of pairing and provides visual, olfactory or auditory cues to help children in decision making. 93 children from a French elementary school (including 11 cognitive disabled ones) participated in a preliminary study. The objectives of this study were: (1) to investigate children performance and behaviour in using AR techniques, and (2) to examine specific attitudes of cognitive disabled children confronted to such techniques. We have observed that disabled children were very enthusiastic when using the application and showed a high motivation compared to most other pupils. Moreover, autistic and trisomic children were able to express some positive emotions when confronted to the application. These very encouraging results promote a widespread use of such tools for cognitive disabled children.