Promoting social skills in technology-mediated communication contexts

• Autor(a) principal: Carvalho, Miguel Pedro Santos Paz de
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/31609
• topic: Communication; Social skills; Social interaction; Social curriculum; Assistive technology

Communication is a vital part of our daily lives. It allows us to express ourselves, our needs and feelings, enabling the establishment of relationships with others. Unfortunately, the ability to communicate can often be partially or, even, fully hindered due to a wide range of conditions. Since communication acts as a crucial step for integration, difficulties associated with communication can act as obstacles to those that experience them, making them struggle to feel included in society. Technological solutions designed to assist communication have been proposed with the ultimate goal of bridging deficits that bind those with communication issues to challenging routines. Nevertheless, although technology can play an important role in assisting users to surpass potential communication barriers, it may also give rise to others, pushing the user further away from actual direct social interaction and communication by providing methods that circumvent crucial steps of an actual human to human interaction. Taking in mind the importance of being able to communicate and the multiple facets of technology, but also other dimensions such as social interaction, and building on previous work regarding assistive communication technologies for school kids, this work addresses the promotion of social skills in technology-mediated contexts. To this end, a tool designed to motivate and promote face to face interaction as well as the employment of the user’s social skills during them, is proposed, not to act as a replacement for direct social interaction, but as an instrument to support it and potentially teach and improve one’s social skills. To do so, this tool guides the user through a series of cooperative challenges that can only be surpassed by interacting with others, encompassing the steps to undergo what is defined as a basic social interaction by an adopted validated curriculum, the “Social Compass”, aimed to help people struggling with embracing social interactions. The proposed approach has already been tested by actual end users and professionals in the field of speech therapy with very promising results.