The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2024 Apr;54(4):1317-1331. doi: 10.1007/s10803-022-05878-4. Epub 2023 Jan 12.
Today, the global prevalence of autism is high and continues to increase dramatically. Effective support and interventions are therefore warranted. Augmented reality (AR), one of the recent modalities of immersive technology, is gaining traction in autism interventions. However, there is currently a lack of reviews on the use of AR in children with autism, and what is more, to the authors' knowledge, no systematic review to date has been carried out to exclusively examine the effects of AR on basic social skills in children with autism. Therefore, an evidence-based systematic review was conducted to fill the gap and answer the specific research question: Can AR support children with an autism diagnosis towards developing or promoting social skills, such as greetings? The initial search yielded a total of 416 records. After excluding duplicate articles and screening the abstract and full text, 13 studies were included for analysis. A narrative approach was employed to synthesise and evaluate the research findings to substantially explore the effects of AR-based social interventions. The favourable role of AR technology in fostering social skills in children diagnosed with autism was widely recognised in the included studies although multiple methodological limitations were identified in relation to the quality of the included studies. Overall, the promising findings may suggest the effectiveness of AR in improving social skills in children with autism. Nonetheless, this field of research still calls for more high-quality studies relying on rigorous methodologies.
目前，自闭症在全球的患病率较高，且仍在急剧上升。因此，需要有效的支持和干预措施。增强现实（AR）作为沉浸式技术的最新模式之一，在自闭症干预中逐渐受到关注。然而，目前针对 AR 在自闭症儿童中的应用，缺乏相关综述，据作者所知，迄今为止，尚无专门针对 AR 对自闭症儿童基本社交技能影响的系统评价。因此，为了填补这一空白并回答具体的研究问题，我们进行了一项基于证据的系统评价：AR 能否支持自闭症诊断儿童发展或促进社交技能，例如问候？最初的搜索共产生了 416 条记录。在排除重复文章并筛选摘要和全文后，纳入了 13 项研究进行分析。采用叙述方法综合和评估研究结果，深入探讨基于 AR 的社交干预对自闭症儿童社交技能的影响。尽管纳入研究的质量存在多个方法学局限性，但纳入的研究广泛认为 AR 技术在培养自闭症儿童的社交技能方面发挥了积极作用。总体而言，有前景的研究结果可能表明 AR 对改善自闭症儿童社交技能的有效性。然而，这一研究领域仍需要更多基于严格方法学的高质量研究。
