Evaluation of an Immersive Virtual Reality Safety Training Used to Teach Pedestrian Skills to Children With Autism Spect
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Evaluation of an Immersive Virtual Reality Safety Training Used to Teach Pedestrian Skills to Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder Dennis R. Dixon 1
&
Christopher J. Miyake 1 & Karen Nohelty 1 & Marlena N. Novack 1 & Doreen Granpeesheh 1
# The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at an increased risk of injury, making safety skills training essential. Whether such training is conducted in the natural environment or in contrived settings is an important consideration for generalization and safety purposes. Immersive virtual reality (VR) environments may offer the advantages of both contrived and natural environment training settings, providing structure to create repeated learning opportunities in a safe and realistic analogue of the natural environment. The current study evaluated the effectiveness of an immersive VR safety skills training environment in teaching 3 children with ASD to identify whether it is safe to cross the street. After modifications to the VR training environment, all 3 participants reached mastery criteria in both VR and natural environment settings. Findings suggest that immersive VR is a promising medium for the delivery of safety skills training to individuals with ASD. Keywords Autism spectrum disorder . Virtual reality . Safety . Pedestrian . Street crossing
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a pervasive developmental disorder that is characterized by deficits in social communication and social interaction, as well as by restrictive or repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, and activities (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). The deficits characteristic of ASD likely contribute to the increased risk of injury (Lee, Harrington, Chang, & Connors, 2008) and injury-related mortality (Guan & Li, 2017) experienced by diagnosed individuals. As such, it is imperative to incorporate safety skills training into treatment programs for individuals with ASD. There has been an increase in safety skills training research for individuals with ASD in recent years. In 2010, Dixon, Bergstrom, Smith, and Tarbox conducted a review of safety skills training for individuals with developmental disabilities and identified a number of studies that evaluated behavioral and educational safety skills trainings on emergency situations, accident prevention, and pedestrian skills; however, at the time of that review, very few studies included participants with ASD diagnoses. Since that review, many more studies
* Dennis R. Dixon [email protected] 1
Center for Autism and Related Disorders, 21600 Oxnard Street, Suite 1800, Woodland Hills, CA 91367, USA
have focused on safety skills training for individuals with ASD, which have addressed skills for abduction prevention and appropriate response to lures from strangers (Akmanoglu & TekinIftar, 2011; Bergstrom, Najdowski, & Tarbox, 2014; Gunby, Carr, & LeBlanc, 2010; Gunby & Rapp, 2014; Ledbetter-Cho et al., 2016), pedestrian safety (Harriage, Blair, & Miltenberger, 2016; Josman, Ben-Chaim, Frie
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