Co-designing play activities and monitoring tools with smart interactive toys to support early intervention in Autism Spectrum Disorder and comparable neurodevelopmental conditions Beste Özcan Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council, ISTC-CNR Rome, Italy beste.ozcan@istc.cnr.it Valerio Sperati Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council, ISTC-CNR Rome, Italy valerio.sperati@istc.cnr.it Flora Giocondo Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council, ISTC-CNR Rome, Italy fora.giocondo@istc.cnr.it Jonata Tyska Carvalho Federal University of Santa Catarina, UFSC Florianópolis, Brazil jonata.tyska@ufsc.br Gianluca Baldassarre Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council, ISTC-CNR Rome, Italy gianluca.baldassarre@istc.cnr.it Figure 1: The interactive "smart" toys panda PlusMe and octopus X-8. The toys were used in pilot tests with typical children and with neurodevelopmental disorders; on right, the AI-based monitoring tools, to evaluate social engagement and eye contact. ABSTRACT In this workshop we will present, through live demos, novel tech- nological tools such as interactive "smart" toys for social play and AI-based monitoring tools, developed to support the early treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). We will discuss the potential of such devices, describing also our promising results with ASD chil- dren. The goal of the workshop is to involve the specialist audience in the co-design of some potential aspects of the overall system. In particular, we are interested in collecting feedback and proposals on possible further uses of the system such as additional play activ- ities to stimulate social behaviour; improvements of the monitoring Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). IDC ’23, June 19ś23, 2023, Chicago, IL, USA © 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 979-8-4007-0131-3/23/06. https://doi.org/10.1145/3585088.3589927 tools; potential use of the tools in developmental disorders other than ASD. CCS CONCEPTS · Human-centered computing → Participatory design. KEYWORDS Co-design with Therapists, Interaction Design, Early Intervention, Developmental Disorders ACM Reference Format: Beste Özcan, Valerio Sperati, Flora Giocondo, Jonata Tyska Carvalho, and Gi- anluca Baldassarre. 2023. Co-designing play activities and monitoring tools with smart interactive toys to support early intervention in Autism Spectrum Disorder and comparable neurodevelopmental conditions. In Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’23), June 19ś23, 2023, Chicago, IL, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3585088.3589927 1 INTRODUCTION Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a Neurodevelopmental Disorder (ND), mainly characterised by impairments or atypical behaviour ś 798