ECHOES: An intelligent serious game for fostering social communication in children with autism

This paper presents ECHOES, a serious game built to help young children with Autism Spectrum Conditions practice social communication skills. We focus on the design and implementation of the interactive learning activities, which take place in a two-dimensional sensory garden, and the autonomous virtual agent, which acts as a credible social partner to children with autism. Both the activities and the agent are based on principles of best autism practice and input from users. Specification guidelines are given for building an autonomous socially competent agent that supports learning in this context. We present experimental results pertaining to the effectiveness of the agent based on an extensive evaluation of the ECHOES platform, which show encouraging tendencies for a number of children.