Vizago is an integrated web/mobile application aimed towards children on the autism spectrum. The final goal of this project was to create a mobile gaming application that allows the user (a child with autism, age 7-10) to have fun and engage with their peers, family members, or therapists while also testing themselves and improving their social skill of being able to identify and understand another’s facial expression as well as strengthening the ability to display the facial expression for the emotion they are feeling.  Also, to create a web application for therapists to connect with their patients better and to be able to track their patients strength and weaknesses for better therapy session outcomes.

The UI was designed specifically to be fun, simple, and colorful in order to encourage children to want to play with their friends and family. The gameplay was also fairly straight forward. When a game starts, a user either initiates or responds to a game request. In the example below, the user has received a game request from her friend Jeremy with a photo of the expression he was asked to mimic. The user opens the photo and guesses the emotion until they get it correct and gets a number of points based on how many tries it took. The user then responds by trying to mimic a randomly generated emotion that Vizago gives them and their friend has to try and guess.

The user is given a score for each emotion defined within the game. They can check their scores at any time in order for them to understand what emotions they are great at distinguishing and which ones they need a little bit of help improving on.

Below is the conceptual UI (which was later implemented differently) for therapists to log into and check their patients progress. This allows them to proactively set up goals for their patients and better tailor their sessions towards recognizing and expressing certain emotions. 

For more information, check out vizago.weebly.com.