Teaching Children With Autism to Initiate Social Interactions Using Textual Prompts Delivered via Apple Watches®.

Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often engage in low levels of peer social interactions; therefore, we often need to explicitly teach these skills. In the current study, we implemented a combined tactile and textual prompt, delivered via a text message sent to an Apple Watch®, to prompt social initiations from children with ASD to peers during free play. Results showed that the text message prompts increased the frequency of independent social initiations for both participants. Furthermore, 1 participant continued to emit high levels of independent social initiations during a 1-month follow-up with no prompts. © Association for Behavior Analysis International 2019.