Toby was developed by Moore and colleagues (2013) for children with ASD aged 16 and under. The program targets important areas of language learning as well as skills in sensory awareness, imitation, and social interaction. It has a syllabus with four main skill areas: visual and auditory understanding, receptive and expressive language, social skills including joint attention, and imitation. It uses three fundamental task types:
- Solo: Tasks in which the computer can measure the response directly, and can deliver reinforcement and prompting to the child to find a given stimulus picture from a set of pictures.
- Partner: Other tasks involve the parent. The system presents the stimuli, the parent recognizes the child’s response and prompts as guided by the system (speech and imitation tasks)
- Natural environment tasks: These are completed off the iPad, and instructions are provided by TOBY
There are between 10 and 15 specific skills in each of the four syllabus areas, with 51 skills and 326 tasks in all (34 iPad tasks and 292 natural environment tasks). Children learn social skills, cognitive skills, communication skills, and sensory discrimination.
A pilot study found that this app is easy to use at home, and caters equally well to slow and fast learners. This study received a strength rating score of 1 by our evidence-grading system, due to a lack of valid and reliable data collection methods.
Download Toby (Requires iPad)