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

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 understanding and facial expression recognition. Compared with a baseline, a controlled study with 24 autistic children and their caregivers showed EMooly significantly improved children's emotion recognition skills and its novel features were preferred and appreciated. EMooly demonstrates the potential of AI and AR in enhancing social-emotional development for autistic children via prompt personalizing and engagement, and highlights the importance of caregiver involvement for optimal learning outcomes.