ProCom: Designing and Evaluating a Mobile and Wearable System to Support Proximity Awareness for People with Autism LouAnne E. Boyd UC Irvine Irvine, USA boydl@uci.edu Xinlong Jiang Institute of Computing Technology, CAS; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, jiangxinlong@ict.ac.cn Gillian R. Hayes UC Irvine Irvine, USA gillianrh@ics.uci.edu ABSTRACT People with autism are at risk for social isolation due to differences in their perception and engagement with the social world. In this work, we aim to address one specific concern related to socialization—the understanding, awareness, and use of interpersonal space. Over the course of a year, we iteratively designed and tested a series of concepts for supporting children with autism in perceiving, understanding, and responding to physical proximity with other people. During this process, we developed ProCom, a prototype system for measuring proximity without requiring instrumentation of the environment or another person. We used a variety of low and high fidelity prototypes, culminating in ProCom, to assess the feasibility, utility, and challenges of this approach. The results of these iterative design engagements indicate that wearable assistive technologies can support people in developing awareness of physical proximity in social settings. However, challenges related to both personal and collective use remain. Author Keywords Autism, social skills, self-monitoring, proximity, wearable computing, children, parallel design ACM Classification Keywords K.4.2 [Computers and Society]: Social Issues- Assistive technologies for persons with disabilities INTRODUCTION People with autism often struggle with normative communication and socialization patterns [16,39]. These challenges in turn can lead to social isolation. However, people with autism are not anti-social, far from it. In fact, children with autism often report a desire for more peer social interaction, while experiencing poor social support and more loneliness than their typically developing peers [3]. Despite interest in socialization, children and adolescents with autism are at increased risk for peer rejection and social isolation when they are integrated into mainstream classrooms [8]. Finally, social skill difficulties may precede mood and anxiety problems later in life [17]. Although recent HCI research has focused on supporting socialization for people with autism in face-to-face contexts, these have largely focused on learning how to process emotions of the face (e.g., [1,32]). A wider variety of nonverbal social behaviors, however, are important to socialization, such as head nodding, making eye contact, gesturing, monitoring proximity, and touch [22]. These social behaviors tend to be underrepresented in the intervention literature, perhaps because they can be more difficult to quantify and are less well-understood neuro- biologically. In our work, we tackle one of these issues, proximity regulation, which is the ability to sense and respond to the physical distance between individuals [16,27,28]. Proximity regulation is critical for successful social interaction, as its disregulation can lead to personal space violations (and ensuing feelings of discomfort), as well as the inadvertent miscommunication of social intentions (e.g., aggression, defensiveness, social interest or disinterest, etc.) [20,21]. Estimating the appropriate proximity to stand from someone is a complex and dynamic social judgment [20,27,28,36]. This skill depends on many factors, such as age, gender, emotions, culture, and the relationship between the people in the interaction. Despite the complex reasoning required, most people naturally learn where to stand during social interactions [20,21,29,35,36] by the age of five [31]. However, for people with autism, this may not be automatic [27,39], leading them to act in ways that are unexpected by others [15]. These unexpected behaviors can make people feel uncomfortable, and result in limited opportunities to make and maintain relationships [18]. Certainly, one set of solutions to these challenges lies in making neurotypical people more aware of and sensitive to the challenges people with autism experience related to Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. CHI 2017, May 06-11, 2017, Denver, CO, USA © 2017 ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-4655-9/17/05…$15.00 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3026014 Autism, Disabilities and Assistive Technology CHI 2017, May 6–11, 2017, Denver, CO, USA 2865