Daily Living Skills Training in Virtual Reality to Help Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder in a Real Shopping Scenario

In this paper, we present a study conducted to investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of Virtual Reality (VR) applied to daily living skills (DLS) training of individuals diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In collaboration with a teacher at a school for children and adolescents with mental disorders, a head-mounted display based VR simulation of a supermarket was built and evaluated with the purpose of developing the shopping skills of students diagnosed with ASD. A comparative between-group experiment was conducted on 9 participants, with initiated VR training following a baseline assessment in a real supermarket. After running seven VR training sessions over 10 days for the treatment group, participants were assessed again in the real supermarket. Results show some benefit of training DLS using VR as discussed in the paper.