A few months ago, I attended a talk on uses of virtual reality. One that caught my attention was a computer game for teaching autistic children how to escape if their home were to catch fire. I think the idea is that one trait that some autistic individuals exhibit is a strong reliance on memorization or routine as opposed to what most people would consider independent reasoning or abstraction of information to new situations. This is certainly true of my son's early language abilities, although he continues to make good progress. I kind of had to laugh though - wouldn't it be more helpful if they came up with a VR application to teach these kids to dress themselves or use the bathroom properly or something with more everyday utility that many of them struggle with? I'm much less concerned about the house catching on fire than I am about timely achievement of basic life skills.
I just ran across a news article describing software for the diagnosis of autism. Often, getting a proper diagnosis can be difficult since autism is a spectral disorder with many different manifestations. So a young engineer in India has come up with a screening software that uses input from caregivers along with performance data from an AI gaming system used by the child in order to score the child's probability of falling on the autism spectrum. I thought this was pretty cool.
http://www.theinstitute.ieee.org/portal/site/tionline/menuitem.130a3558587d56e8fb2275875bac26c8/index.jsp?&pName=institute_level1_article&TheCat=1016&article=tionline/legacy/inst2008/may08/profile.xml&
They have also written a couple articles on the system, one entitled "Exploration of Autism using Artificial Intelligence Techniques" (Veeraraghavan & Srinivasan), available from IEEE.
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