AutARK – Automated Adaptation of Overstimulating Contexts

Motivation and Overview

Mental illness and developmental disorders are often related to a reduced ability to work and adapt, which often leads to reduced employability. People with autism are much more likely to be affected by unemployment or to be employed in jobs with low qualification requirements even though they have a good vocational or school education than people without autism. Challenging working conditions such as time pressure, information overload, high communicative demands, social skills, too many sensory stimuli, and the demand for a high degree of flexibility are the main reasons for the low employment rate of people with autism in the primary labor market. Until now, only a few technical aids have been available to profitably support people with autism in their everyday work.

The aim of the AutARK project is to improve and maintain the employability in the primary labor market of people on the autism spectrum by developing technical assistance systems for their everyday work. For this purpose, a special active noise cancellation method will be implemented, for example, to detect the context of a specific conversation and to adaptively filter out irrelevant signals. In addition, the aim is to support people with autism according to their needs in verbal conversational settings with the help of wearable devices. Moreover, haptic, natural interaction modalities will be used to improve task and schedule planning, thus enabling low-disruption and structured work.

The AutARK project intends to develop a system using AI-based technical approaches in a human-centered development process that will be evaluated in a diverse range of everyday work situations by people with autism.

Objectives

The aim of the AutARK project is to improve and maintain the employability and activity in the primary labor market of people on the autism spectrum by developing technical assistance systems for everyday professional work. Furthermore, corresponding stakeholders are to be made aware of the needs of this target group. The following three sub-goals can be derived:

Stimulus reduction: Reduction of stimuli to avoid overstimulation
Communication: Support of verbal and textual communication
Task management: Support of structuring and prioritizing in task and time management