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Ideally, language and reading skills in bilingual children are assessed in both languages spoken in order to avoid misdiagnoses of communication or learning disorders. Due to limited capacity of clinical and educational staff, computerized screenings that allow for automatic evaluation of the children’s performance on reading tasks (accuracy and speed) might pose a useful alternative in clinical and school settings. In this study, a novel web-based screening platform for language and reading assessment is presented. This tool has been preliminarily validated with monolingual Italian, Mandarin–Italian and English–Italian speaking primary school children living and schooled in Italy. Their performances in the screening tasks in Italian and—if bilingual—in their native language were compared to the results of standardized/conventional reading assessment tests as well as parental and teacher questionnaires. Correlations revealed the tasks that best contributed to the identification of risk for the presence of reading disorders and showed the general feasibility and usefulness of the computerized screening. In a further step, both screening administrators (Examiners) and child participants (Examinees) were invited to participate in usability studies, which revealed general satisfaction and provided suggestions for further improvement of the screening platform. Based on these findings, the potential of the novel web-based screening platform is discussed.

Our research explores game play in Wearable Collaborative Virtual Environments (WCVEs) to provide new forms of treatment for persons with Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDD) that complement traditional methods of intervention. We investigate this issue using the Social MatchUP (SMUP) application as a case study. SMUP provides a set of games in WCVEs that have been co-designed with NDD experts and aim at improving communication skills. In SMUP, multiple users wearing a Virtual Reality visor play together to accomplish collaborative tasks that take place in shared virtual environments and require talking to each other to be completed. The paper presents an exploratory empirical study devoted to evaluate the potential of SMUP games for persons with NDD to improve their speech-based conversational capability. We organized participants (24 persons with NDD) in 2 groups, one playing a game in SMUP and one playing a similar game in the real world, and assessed likability, usability, and a number of conversational performance metrics. Our results indicate that the game experience in SMUP was usable and enjoyable, and boosted higher conversational skills with respect to its counterpart in the physical setting.

Mixed Reality (MR) has been receiving increasing interest in the rehabilitation of people with Cognitive Disabilities. The power of MR in the context of therapies is the possibility to maintain a physical and psychological relationship with the surrounding environment while experiencing customized multimedia content and tasks that are appropriate for the needs of these users. The purpose of this work is to explore the potential of MR applications integrated with interactive speech-based Virtual Assistants. We present HoloLearn, an application for Microsoft HoloLens, which aims to help people with Cognitive Disabilities to improve their autonomy and learn simple activities of their everyday life (e.g., setting the table). The paper discusses the design features of the Virtual Assistant created and the results of a controlled study. The participants involved were 15 subjects with Cognitive Disabilities who used HoloLearn in two experimental conditions - with and without a Virtual Assistant. The results, although preliminary, indicate that enriching a MR experience with the presence of a speech-based Virtual Assistant would improve the user performance in the execution of the MR activities.