Extended Reality (XR) and telehealth interventions for children or adolescents with autism spectrum disorder: Systematic review of qualitative and quantitative studies

Abstract

World Health Organization reported that almost one in 100 children is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) worldwide. Extended Reality (XR) and Telehealth interventions are evident to be effective for ASD treatments. While there is no comprehensive systematic review to summarize and evaluate the evidence for promoting the accessibility of different technology-based treatment regiments. This paper aims to verify the efficacy and validity of XR and Telehealth interventions for children and adolescents with ASD. We reviewed 112 studies from databases of PubMed, Web of Science and Cochrane Library, published in English between January 2010 to April 1st, 2022. We found that after interventions, positive improvements for ASD participants were observed in social interaction, acceptance, and engagement, communication and speech, emotion recognition and control, daily living skill, problem behavior reduction, attention, cost reduction, anxiety symptom reduction, pretend play, contextual processing, match to sample skill, and insomnia control. Our findings provide a solid and positive evidence of XR and Telehealth interventions in improving the treatment outcomes for children and adolescents with ASD. In the future, more research with RCTs and standardized outcome measurements are required to establish the therapeutic efficiency of the two interventions independently or combined.

Keywords: Autism Spectrum Disorder; Distance learning; Extended reality; Telehealth; Virtual and augmented reality.