Position Paper: An Emoji-Based Interactive App to Aid Emotion Expression for Autistic Children

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition typically characterized by two core characteristics as restricted, repetitive behaviors and impairment in social communication. As such, a large portion of the technology studies within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has been focused on improving social skills for autistic individuals in the past decade. Meantime, autism is primarily perceived as a medical deficit that requires "corrections." Technology often requires autistic children to adjust their behaviors and traits to cater to "normative" modes of interaction that are deemed to be appropriate for the neurotypical society. The goal of most technology research for autistic individuals is to satisfy the extrinsic purpose while ignoring autistic children are the actual primary users using the technology. An ample number of studies have been evaluated on using different approaches to educate autistic children on comprehending and interpreting the emotions of neurotypical individuals. Yet, few works have taken the opposite approach that invites the neurotypical user to read the emotions of autistic children during social interaction. In this work, we propose an emoji-based interactive app that aims to aid autistic children in expressing their emotions while encouraging neurotypical individuals to comprehend the emotions of autistic children to foster bi-directional social interaction.