Autistic children experience some difficulties during social interaction such as playing with peers because of poor understanding to coordinate their voice along with body. As an attempt to develop their interest in games and over comes with these behavioral problems, researchers have designed a new toy and claimed that it will play a role to help autistic children learn positive playing skills.

The lead researcher, Helen Andreae, in collaboration with her team at Victoria University said that the new responsive, mechanized toy has was designed to enhance speaking, touching, and collaborating skills of autistic children.

"This can scare other children away when they are trying to make friends. I have had an awareness of autism for a long time, through family discussions and through observing the autistic child of a friend. In developing my design challenge, I thought a toy which could help families dealing with autism”, explained Andreae.

The toy named as ‘Auti’ is enabled with a number of programmable sensors to detect touch and sound and further acquires an ability to shut down in response to negative behaviors including hitting or screaming.

The toy is programmed for spontaneous response with movement for any sort of friendly interaction such as stroking or soft speaking.