Investigating the performance on comprehending 3D social emotion through a mobile learning system for individuals with autistic spectrum disorder

Difficulty in understanding emotions is one of the core characteristics in individuals with individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study adopted the features of mobile learning system to develop 3D complex facial expression recognition system (3CFER), which was based on a client-server solution. The system contained a 3D humanoid character with animated emotions and various social events. The participants in the system could learn a social event caused an emotion. The study used a pretest & posttest method in 18 participants for examining learning effects for each participant. Thus, the main question was to explore how children with ASD performed realizing facial expression using the 3CFER system, and find out the impacts of using a mobile learning system. The primary results of this study indicated that the 3CFER system was beneficial for children with ASD to learn emotions, and they performed outstanding well (e.g., shared with other people) when using this system. The advantage of using this mobile-emotion learning system was to promote realizing emotions, and at least, provided the opportunity of engaging other people for individual of ASD.