Teaching intelligible speech to the autistic children by interactive computer games

Autism is considered to be a disorder of neural development which affects about 1 in every 150 kids. Specifically, some children with ASD are not fortunate enough to acquire the ability to communicate in their own language. Since speech is an important media of communication, socialization, and interaction with the world, these children need assistance while delivering speech to communicate to the world. Without proper speaking skills, these autistic children face difficulties in expressing their needs and emotions, too. Doctors, therapists, and special teachers usually help kids with autism to overcome many difficulties. However, the traditional methods of teaching clear speech to the autistic children suffer from being monotonous, laborious and not successful in many cases. Hence, we developed an interactive computer game which will be helpful to increase intelligibility in autistic children. During our five months of intervention with the autistic children of Autism Welfare Foundation (AWF) at Dhaka, we checked the effectiveness of this therapy and got some encouraging results.