Home-based care (HBC) delivers medical and care services in patients’ living environments, offering unique opportunities for patient-centered care. However, patient agency is often inadequately represented in shared HBC planning processes. Through 23 multi-stakeholder interviews with HBC patients, healthcare professionals, and care workers, alongside 60 hours of ethnographic observations, we examined how patient agency manifests in HBC and why this representation gap occurs. Our findings reveal that patient agency is not a static individual attribute but a relational capacity shaped through maintaining everyday continuity, mutual recognition from care providers, and engagement with material home environments. Furthermore, we identified that structured documentation systems filter out contextual knowledge, informal communication channels fragment patient voices, and doctor-centered hierarchies position patients as passive recipients. Drawing on these insights, we propose design considerations to bridge this representation gap and to integrate patient agency into shared HBC plans.

Autistic individuals often draw on insights from their supportive networks to develop self-help life strategies ranging from everyday chores to social activities. However, human resources may not always be immediately available. Recently emerging conversational agents (CAs) that leverage large language models (LLMs) have the potential to serve as powerful information-seeking tools, facilitating autistic individuals to tackle daily concerns independently. This study explored the opportunities and challenges of LLM-driven CAs in empowering autistic individuals through focus group interviews and workshops (N=14). We found that autistic individuals expected LLM-driven CAs to offer a non-judgmental space, encouraging them to approach day-to-day issues proactively. However, they raised issues regarding critically digesting the CA responses and disclosing their autistic characteristics. Based on these findings, we propose approaches that place autistic individuals at the center of shaping the meaning and role of LLM-driven CAs in their lives, while preserving their unique needs and characteristics.

Online dating is a space where autistic individuals can find romantic partners with reduced social demands. Autistic individuals are often expected to adapt their behaviors to the social norms underlying the online dating platform to appear as desirable romantic partners. However, given that their autistic traits can lead them to different expectations of dating, it is uncertain whether conforming their behaviors to the norm will guide them to the person they truly want. In this paper, we explored the perceptions and expectations of autistic adults in online dating through interviews and workshops. We found that autistic people desired to know whether they behaved according to the platform’s norms. Still, they expected to keep their unique characteristics rather than unconditionally conform to the norm. We conclude by providing suggestions for designing inclusive online dating experiences that could foster self-guided decisions of autistic users and embrace their unique characteristics.

Implementing structure into our daily lives is critical for maintaining health, productivity, and social and emotional well-being. New norms for routine management have emerged during the current pandemic, and in particular, individuals with autism find it difficult to adapt to those norms. While much research has focused on the use of computer technology to support individuals with autism, little is known about ways of helping them establish and maintain “self-directed” routine structures. In this paper, we identify design requirements for an app that support four key routine components (i.e., physical activity, diet, mindfulness, and sleep) through a formative study and develop RoutineAid, a gamified smartphone app that reflects the design requirements. The results of a two-month field study on design feasibility highlight two affordances of RoutineAid—the establishment of daily routines by facilitating micro-planning and the maintenance of daily routines through celebratory interactions. We discuss salient design considerations for the future development of daily routine management tools for individuals with autism.

Pervasive symptoms of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), such as a lack of social and communication skills, are major challenges to be embraced in the workplace. Although much research has proposed VR training programs, their effectiveness is somewhat unclear, since they provide limited, one-sided interactions through fixed scenarios or do not sufficiently reflect the characteristics of people with ASD (e.g., preference for predictable interfaces, sensory issues). In this paper, we present VISTA, a VR-based interactive social skill training system for people with ASD. We ran a user study with 10 people with ASD and 10 neurotypical people to evaluate user experience in VR training and to examine the characteristics of people with ASD based on their physical responses generated by sensor data. The results showed that ASD participants were highly engaged with VISTA and improved self-efficacy after experiencing VISTA. The two groups showed significant differences in sensor signals as the task complexity increased, which demonstrates the importance of considering task complexity in eliciting the characteristics of people with ASD in VR training. Our findings not only extend findings (e.g., low ROI ratio, EDA increase) in previous studies but also provide new insights (e.g., high utterance rate, large variation of pupil diameter), broadening our quantitative understanding of people with ASD.

A growing number of organizations are hiring autistic individuals as they start to recognize the value of a neurodiverse workforce. Despite this trend, the lack of support for autistic employees in workplaces complicates their employment. However, little is known about how people around autistic individuals can support them to create pleasant employment experiences. In this work, we develop the concept of the Workplace Playbook VR to investigate how virtual reality (VR) can help autistic people develop their work-related social communication skills in partnership with people in their support network. Using a video prototype to present the concept, we interviewed 28 participants, including 10 autistic people and 18 members of their support networks, which included family members and professionals. Our interviews revealed that the Workplace Playbook VR program can provide common ground for autistic people and members of their support network to participate in more empathetic communication regarding workplace challenges. Despite the benefits, we identified the potential misuse of social communication skills training features of the VR program to correct the personal characteristics of autistic individuals. Furthermore, to cultivate inclusive workplace environments, we found the needs of VR development not only for autistic people but also for neurotypical employees to promote their understanding of autism and empathy toward autistic employees. We suggest VR designs that promote a sense of agency and self-advocacy for autistic employees, and autism awareness and acceptance training for neurotypical employees.

Voice-based Conversational Agents (VCA) have served as personal assistants that support individuals with special needs. Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may also benefit from VCAs to deal with their everyday needs and challenges, ranging from self-care to social communications. In this study, we explored how VCAs could encourage adolescents with ASD in navigating various aspects of their daily lives through the two-week use of VCAs and a series of participatory design workshops. Our findings demonstrated that VCAs could be an engaging, empowering, emancipating tool that supports adolescents with ASD to address their needs, personalities, and expectations, such as promoting self-care skills, regulating negative emotions, and practicing conversational skills. We propose implications of using off-the-shelf technologies as a personal assistant to ASD users in Assistive Technology design. We suggest design implications for promoting positive opportunities while mitigating the remaining challenges of VCAs for adolescents with ASD.

Adolescence is a challenging period for individuals with autism because they undergo radical physical, emotional, and social transitions. We describe our setup to support the self-management of adolescents with autism for assisting adaptive transitions. We propose COSMA, an interactive mobile application that allows both individuals with autism and their caregivers to cooperatively manage, plan, reflect on, and improve behavior. COSMA is a self- management tool for adolescents with autism, including behavioral goal setting by means of the co-contract process, self-reporting while performing everyday tasks, and cooperative reflection to support their smooth transition to adulthood.