Inspiration
You would think that by 2025 we would have leveraged tech better to help individuals with ASD practice their social skills. Over 75,000,000 people (1% of the population) are diagnosed with ASD, yet digital support tools remain limited.
According to the University of Arkansas, individuals with ASD often struggle to form meaningful social connections due to various challenges - including difficulties with social norms and nonverbal communication. They have trouble understanding social cues, using expressive and receptive language skills, and conveying thoughts and emotions. Many also find it hard to show empathy to others and even themselves.
What it does
Enter Storybook - our solution built on scientific evidence. There are 3 main components we developed after extensive research:
First, the Read page lets you create your own story and guides you through follow-up questions to help process the narrative. The story runs through the Gemini API with prompts specifically designed for people with autism. We use simple words, emojis, and thoughtful coloring to prevent overstimulation and sensory overload.
Next, Write acts as an emotion journal. It reads through the entries and serves as a companion who helps better understand emotions. This could mean suggesting solutions to problems, empathizing with the situation, or simply helping them identify what they are feeling.
The Emotion tab helps build emotion recognition skills through quizzes. It shows you pictures of facial expressions and asks you to identify the feelings shown. This directly supports the cognitive skill development that many autistic individuals work on in therapy - we're just making it available online.
Storybook aims to boost cognitive skills using scientifically-proven methods - from generating engaging stories to live journaling with emotional analysis to facial expression training. We even include a dashboard for tracking progress.
How we built it
Tech Stack: We built this using ASTRO (the cleanest, swiftest and most fun!) with TypeScript, JavaScript, and CSS(and pizza). We integrated the Gemini Flash 1.5 model and attempted text-to-speech (whether it works... that's another story 😅). Freeform helped us prototype without endless code rewrites.
Challenges we ran into
Multitasking between lectures and debugging -_- That fun hour when everything except the buttons showed up (but teamwork and StackOverflow got us through!)
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're super proud of every feature we built, actually implementing nearly everything we thought of. Coding at 1am instead of sleeping
What we learned
While working on this, we learned tons - including an initial 3-hour detour into ASD datasets that taught us about data training, even though we ultimately went a different direction. And our StackOverflow skills? Through the roof!
What's next for Stoorybook
More animations, we wanted a lot more animations but we found numerous research stating to keep websites as minimal as possible in order for indivuals with ASD to not get overwhelmed. Many autistic people experience hypersensitivity source:link
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