ParaShop: Shopping Assistance to ASD Individuals with a Mobile AR App

Due to executive functioning challenges typical of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), many people with ASD face barriers with adaptive living skills and developing independence. It is difficult for people with ASD to learn skills such as processing information, social, and speech interaction with the public in a busy environment. Although several studies have used Virtual Reality (VR) to help people with ASD learn daily living skills, users of the VR system may still not be able to finish the real-world tasks, even though they are well trained in the virtual world. In this paper, a mobile AR application for Android and iOS devices, ParaShop, is introduced to help people with ASD go through the supermarket's shopping sequences. ParaShop allows users to create shopping lists with images and automatic categorization of items, which are more intuitive to ASD users. ParaShop also provides instructions with AR scenes to help ASD users to complete their tasks, which is critical for this population. A short YouTube demo video of this application can be found at  https://youtu.be/77tp3julNZ0.