A cognitive mapping approach in real-time haptic rendering interaction for improved spatial learning ability among autistic people / Kesavan Krishnan

Kesavan , Krishnan (2024) A cognitive mapping approach in real-time haptic rendering interaction for improved spatial learning ability among autistic people / Kesavan Krishnan. PhD thesis, Universiti Malaya.

	PDF (The Candidate's Agreement) Restricted to Repository staff only Download (238Kb)
	PDF (Thesis PhD) Download (7Mb)

Abstract

Haptics is the utmost emergent science of technology that studies sensorimotor and haptic feedback through the interaction of a human with the virtual environment. Meanwhile, in the past decade, the use of haptic technology in autism has increased in terms of various disciplines that can assist in improving their learning skills. Nevertheless, the use of haptic technology in terms of spatial learning is still not fully utilized, and this weakens autistic people in the process of learning about their surroundings. Spatial knowledge is the ability of autistic people to navigate independently to a desired location and interact with the object’s surroundings. Even though there has been recent achievement in haptic-based virtual environments (HBVE), the designing process of HBVE for spatial learning of autistic people has become more challenging. This is due to the lack of haptic-based virtual environment frameworks (HBVE-Framework) to provide better guidelines for designers during the course of the entire design process. This means that the proposed framework through this research becomes a fundamental principle in the development of a haptic-based virtual environment. The main objective of this research is to develop and present a HBVEF-framework to design a HBVE for autistic people to improve their spatial awareness and to significantly improve their interaction abilities through haptic rendering. This research also aims to present a reliable autonomous algorithm that minimizes the issues with localization and navigation skills among autistic people in a HBVE to improve their wayfinding and spatial knowledge. Moreover, this research also aims to examine the use of haptics modalities in autistic people to have the sense of touch and feel the surface of three-dimensional objects as an interaction tactic. This research begins by identifying the most appropriate components related to autistic people and the HBVE through literature review and the existing HBVEF-Framework. The identified components were then organized into a model-view-controller (MVC) pattern which was adapted from the modern GUI development platform to describe the structure of the HBVE-Framework. The constructed framework was evaluated by expert reviews from the perspective of different scholars and re-designed based on the expert reviews. Furthermore, a HBVE application was developed to demonstrate the logical view of the proposed framework. As part of user usability, a heuristic evaluation based on case study was conducted on the application to identify the usability problems and improve the usability of the application. Meanwhile, experimental evaluation of the application was conducted in four different groups to measure the efficiency and performance of the application; experimental evaluation based on navigation algorithms, experimental evaluation based on haptic sensory sensitivity, experimental evaluation based on real-time haptic rendering interaction and experimental evaluation based on the performance of autistic people with using the application in spatial learning and cognitive mapping. The outcomes of this conducted experiment proved with certainty that it could be mainstream in the process of developing a HBVE application related to autism.

Actions (For repository staff only : Login required)