Practice That’s No Game

Down the street from a crime scene, a police officer approaches a young man who’s behaving oddly. He refuses to make eye contact with the officer, whose questions go unanswered. Then the young man turns and runs.

To an untrained eye, it appears the officer has located the suspect—and simply needs to give chase. But instead, he or she may have found someone with autism. The neurological disorder, often characterized by difficulties with communication, social interaction and sensory processing, can make it hard to follow directions and calmly interact.

And when interactions with the police go wrong, it can turn tragic. In a notorious 2016 incident in Florida, an officer shot and wounded a caregiver after the autistic man he was with didn’t comply with orders to put down a toy train mistaken for a weapon. In another incident this June, an off-duty police officer killed a nonverbal man with cognitive disabilities he said had attacked him in line at a store, and shot the man’s parents as well.

Fears about such incidents helped inspire University of Maryland computer scientist Vibha Sazawal’s idea for a virtual reality app so people with developmental disabilities can safely practice dicey social situations, like police stops, that can baffle them. Sazawal’s son, Manoj, 9, has autism.

“You don’t know how many unwritten social rules there are to follow until you see what happens when someone doesn’t know what the rules are,” says Sazawal, a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and a visiting research scientist in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).

Starting in 2016, she developed the app, Floreo, with Manoj’s father, Vijay Ravindran, a software engineer and former engineering director at Amazon. She had been an assistant professor of computer science at UMD until she resigned to care for Manoj several years ago; she left Floreo to return to the university last year.

To practice interaction in a virtual world, Floreo users wear a VR headset while a therapist, teacher or parent controls the session. Users encounter cartoony police officers—first a friendly female cop who gently questions the user on a peaceful sidewalk during daylight hours. In later stages, more insistent male officers interrogate the user on a darkened street with flashing lights, sirens and loud noises that could put anyone on edge. In each case, the user is asked to choose the correct response.

“When my son first tried it, the virtual police officer asked him a question, and he responded, ‘I really like your car,’” Sazawal said. “That’s not an answer to any of the questions. But we start at that first level and practice these skills before moving to higher levels where it’s more challenging.”

Some research suggests that immersive virtual reality training environments have advantages versus other training simulations, and Sazawal is collaborating with researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and St. Joseph’s University in ongoing research to determine whether Floreo’s police interaction program beats video training programs designed to impart the same skills.

Researchers have divided study participants into one group that uses Floreo and another that watches videos. Afterward, they’re tested in interactions with real Philadelphia police officers following predetermined scripts to see whether either program effectively taught the autistic study participants any useful skills.

Floreo is more than just an educational game, said Joseph McCleery, an assistant professor of psychology and executive director of academic programs in the Kinney Center for Autism Education and Support at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

“The thing that makes Floreo unique is the fact that it has the iPad link to it in real time,” said McCleery, who was part of the app’s development team. “It’s actually a lesson where a certified teacher or a parent gets to control what happens.”

Although there are safety concerns about the overuse of VR in children, whose visual systems can be harmed, McCleery said, such training can be used judiciously to prime users for  practice sessions with actual officers, which are even rarer: “Generally, you don’t have police officers who can come into the classroom all the time, but perhaps you practice in virtual reality a few times and follow it with a real-life experience.”

With clinical testing still in progress, Sazawal said she’s already seen enough to know virtual reality training—with its tightly controlled environments that can be tuned to minimize stress for a population group prone to overstimulation—has lots of promise.

“Even on some basic skills, like making eye contact, we’ve seen that after using Floreo for a while and then observing them in real life, people do improve,” she said.

Sazawal hopes that eventually, scripted experiences in the virtual world of the Floreo app will open the door to safer, fuller lives for Manoj and other autistic children.

“There’s a juggling act—wanting him to have all kinds of life experiences on one hand, but wanting to shield him from potentially negative interactions,” she said.