Designing Behavioral Visualizations for Facilitating Communication in Clinical Settings

This paper presents a comparative study of two webtools developed to capture engagement via visualization of coordinated communication behavior in children with autism. A clear preference arose for different tasks based on behavior granularity emphasis in the two visualizations. The survey and interview results further revealed the importance of showing behavior patterns, rather than displaying a single behavior without context, in behavior visualization. Based on the results, we propose three granularity-related features to incorporate into behavioral visualizations for communication in clinical settings: separating modalities, coordinating dyadic interactions, and displaying micro-behaviors.