Teach Yourself to Learn (Facial) Expressions: An Acceptability and Usability Study of an App Teaching Facial Emotion Recognition Skills to Autistic Children

This study investigated TYLES, an iPad app adapting a tile-matrix task to support facial expression recognition in autistic children. The main aims of the study were to create an engaging app, assess user engagement and gauge its appeal with this population. Fifteen autistic children and their caregivers participated. Children used the iPad app daily for two weeks. While usability of the app was high, caregivers reported it as monotonous despite being easy for the child to navigate. Interestingly, children used the app for 12.6 minutes per day and achieved high accuracy (>90%) in recognizing emotions regardless of the expression type. These findings suggest children were already skilled at recognizing basic emotions, rendering the task unchallenging. Overall, the study results suggested that the TYLES app was usable but not accepted in its current form. This highlights the need for co-produced interventions and reconsidering the population on which the app is tested.