It happens many times as part of a long, sometimes heart-breaking, stories of children with autism having difficulties to communicate with their family. As such, the motivation to create the “+me” device started. Since the most impairing symptom is the difficulty to communicate with others, the “+me” project embodies an innovative transitional object with potential to support and motivate child-caregiver and child-parent interactions based on the peculiarities of the autistic child cognition. The main purposes are to enhance the motivation of the child to communicate, to improve his/her basic interaction skills with others, and to extend the child’s ability to communicate and play with others while being kept engaged in every-day activities. The “+me” device is a soft (100% cotton fabric) interactive collar pillow that provides visual, auditory, and haptic sensorial feedback. It has embedded pressure sensors, color changing lights, and small speakers. The features can be remotely controlled to adjust the type of feedbacks the pillow returns.
The new prototype has new features (e.g, Bluetooth connection with tablet, speakers, capacitative sensor, new look) in respect to the previous prototype presented in Maker Faire 2014. Moreover, the prototype has already started to be experimented with children and therapists of "Istituto Villa Dante".