Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Universal Access in the Information Society https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-020-00761-4 SHORT PAPER Towards developing digital interventions supporting empathic ability for children with autism spectrum disorder Seung Jin Chung 1  · Gheorghita Ghinea 1 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract It is very challenging for children with autism to express their emotions to others as well as to recognise others’ feelings accurately. As social difculties of autistic people might aggravate their loneliness and social isolation, a holistic development is required from an early age. This study aimed to suggest a digital intervention for supporting autistic children’s empathy development by using design thinking. This study developed a mobile-interface design on the basis of the human-centred design approach, and a prototype was evaluated by stakeholders with respect to acceptability and usability. Usability was measured by twelve statements of a combination of design guidelines and the system usability scale, and subsequently, open-end interview questions were ofered to collect data regarding acceptability. The separate interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, and thus, meaningful data were selected and clustered by themes. The result of the qualitative data analysis is represented by eighteen themes in fve categories. Altogether, this research suggests a phased (bit-by-bit) strategy for teaching empathy of children with ASD through a digital intervention. Keywords Digital intervention · Autism · Empathy · Human-centred design · Interface design 1 Introduction ‘Empathy’ is an emotional state to understand others’ feel- ings, thoughts and intentions from others’ emotional state or situation [2, 39]. As a core component of emotional intel- ligence, empathy helps people to get involved in society [11, 13, 75]. Through empathic ability, people can respond appropriately to others’ situation verbally or nonverbally. Specifcally, accurate empathy (1) helps everyday social interactions, (2) enables mutual assistance, (3) strengthens the social bond, and (4) improves self-regulation. Con- sidering that empathy draws on an individual’s appropri- ate behaviour from the cognitive or emotional recognition of the context or surrounding environments, empathising can be deemed as a process linking perception and action [76]. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterised by persistent impairments in social communication and social interactions including the presence of restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests or activities [1]. Thus, it is not easy for autistic children to react appropriately following external conditions owing to their cognitive disability, which hinders grasping social cues from one’s facial expressions [22, 51, 83, 84]. Although it is expected that autistic indi- viduals have a difculty of empathising with others due to their low social skills, autism does not mean ‘zero degrees of empathy’; instead, studies focused on autism have shown that empathy, especially the afective aspect [3, 60], and more importantly, social skills can be fostered by appropri- ate interventions [22, 35, 51, 83, 84]. One avenue through which individuals with ASD could be aided to learn social-related skills and which encour- ages empathy is that of design thinking (DT). In general, the design process is likely to be benefcial to encourage emotional intelligence such as creativity, problem-solving, social skills as well as empathy [68, 87], and each phrase of the DT process can afect one or both empathy dimensions: cognitive and afective [34]. Furthermore, visual-based com- munication of design can be assumed to be useful for autistic children’s learning in consideration of the picture exchange communication system (PECS), which is known as an efec- tive communication tool for autism [32, 92]. In this regard, a * Gheorghita Ghinea george.ghinea@brunel.ac.uk Seung Jin Chung sj101js@yonsei.ac.kr 1 Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea