A logs based verification tool of serious games targeting autistic children

Abstract

Serious games are referred as entertaining tools with a purpose of education, where players cultivate their knowledge and practice their skills through overcoming numerous hindrances during gaming. The correct implementation of serious games is extremely important to ensure a high level of adoption of the competencies by the game users, which can be even more challenging if we target autistic children. Understanding the actual needs of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and supporting their learning activity through serious games can be a burden especially for game developers. This master thesis presents logs based verification tool, named Game verification Tool (GVT), to assist game developers identify potential scenes of the serious games that might be causing any negative emotion on the autistic children. Our approach focuses on monitoring negative emotions, like stress, derived from physiological data. GVT architecture follows a client sever model, which enables to merge the game logs (hosted at the client side) with the emotional data logs gathered via Bluetooth. The data analysis and visualisation which carried out at the server side, should provide relevant information to support developers to enhance the quality of serious games targeting autistic people.