EMooly: Supporting Autistic Children in Collaborative Social-Emotional Learning with Caregiver Participation through Interactive AI-infused and AR Activities

Fig. 1. EMooly is an innovative tablet-based augmented reality (AR) game designed to enhance the social-emotional learning of children with autism. Utilizing advanced AI for generating personalized narratives and interactive activities, EMooly involves caregivers in a multi-phase learning process. In this engaging setup, children, assisted by their caregivers, navigate through customized stories and activities that foster emotion recognition and social interaction skills, integrating personal items and familiar environments to create an immersive and personalized experience.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have social-emotional deficits that lead to difficulties in recognizing emotions as well as understanding and responding to social interactions. This study presents EMooly, a tablet game that actively involves caregivers and leverages augmented reality (AR) and generative AI (GenAI) to enhance social-emotional learning for autistic children. Through a year of collaborative effort with five domain experts, we developed EMooly that engages children through personalized social stories, interactive and fun activities, and enhanced caregiver participation, focusing on emotion