It is very challenging for children with autism to express their emotions to others as well as to recognise others’ feelings accurately. As social difficulties of autistic people might aggravate their loneliness and social isolation, a holistic development is required from an early age. This study aimed to suggest a digital intervention for supporting autistic children’s empathy development by using design thinking. This study developed a mobile-interface design on the basis of the human-centred design approach, and a prototype was evaluated by stakeholders with respect to acceptability and usability. Usability was measured by twelve statements of a combination of design guidelines and the system usability scale, and subsequently, open-end interview questions were offered to collect data regarding acceptability. The separate interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, and thus, meaningful data were selected and clustered by themes. The result of the qualitative data analysis is represented by eighteen themes in five categories. Altogether, this research suggests a phased (bit-by-bit) strategy for teaching empathy of children with ASD through a digital intervention.

对于自闭症儿童来说，向他人表达自己的情感以及准确地识别他人的感受非常具有挑战性。由于自闭症患者的社会困难可能会加剧他们的孤独感和社会孤立感，因此从小就需要全面发展。这项研究旨在建议一种数字干预，通过使用设计思维来支持自闭症儿童的同理心发展。这项研究在以人为本的设计方法的基础上开发了移动接口设计，并且利益相关者在可接受性和可用性方面对原型进行了评估。可用性是通过将设计准则和系统可用性规模相结合的十二种陈述来衡量的，随后，提供了开放式访谈问题来收集有关可接受性的数据。记录了各个访谈并逐字记录，因此，按主题选择了有意义的数据并进行了聚类。定性数据分析的结果由五个类别中的18个主题表示。总而言之，这项研究提出了一种分阶段（逐位）策略，通过数字干预来指导ASD儿童的移情。