There is a need to use the best from both worlds
“The research on VR and autism seems to be done separately in two camps” Dechsling states.
The research done in this area seems to be conducted by either researchers that are technology-focused, or autism-focused. Dechsling goes on to say that “using VR for intervention with autistic children show promise, but there is a need to join forces between camps and capitalize on the expertise in more than one camp when doing such specialized research”.
The article contains a systematic review of whether the so-called Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions (NDBI) have been deployed in VR-interventions for autistic children. NDBIs currently holds the status as the most effective interventions for autistic children but has as of yet not been deployed through VR-interventions.
“We believe that new technological advancements need to take into consideration information from what is known within traditional intervention research in the field, there is no need starting from scratch” Dechsling states.
As a consequence, they introduced in their article the term Virtual Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions (VNDBI) as a way of combining the best knowledge on interventions, and technology.
The article is Open Access and can be found here.
The next step in Dechsling’s PhD-project (under supervision of professor Anders Nordahl-Hansen) is to conduct a VR-intervention that take into account the information that can be derived from VNDBI in helping autistic adolescents with their social communication skill repertoire.