AI-Powered Comic Diary Autiverse: Turning an Autistic Teen's Day into a Story

For autistic teens, organizing a day's events in chronological order and putting emotions into words is not easy. Autiverse is a tablet app in the form of AI-guided multimodal journaling designed to ease this burden, helping users organize their experiences into a four-panel comic structured as A-B-C-E.

The core idea is the ABC model used in behavioral therapy, with Emotion (E) added on top. Users first choose a place and people, then the AI asks step-by-step questions to help unpack the event, after which the content is checked, elaborated, and revised to complete the comic diary. Instead of free-form writing, the process runs as a structured conversation, reducing the burden of not knowing where to start.

The visual style was also deliberately kept simple. Instead of realistic generated images, the app uses simple characters inspired by the expressionless wooden figures used in counseling settings, so that users focus on the flow of the story rather than on drawing detail. The AI's role was also set as a peer rather than a teacher or therapist, to reduce the feeling of being evaluated and encourage a more comfortable conversation.

The actual validation was conducted at home over 2 weeks with 10 pairs of autistic teens and their parents. The teens wrote diary entries for an average of 12.2 days, with 4 of them writing on all 14 days, and each session took about 9 minutes on average. Conversation log analysis showed that A and B tended to appear early on, while C and E mainly emerged in later stages, with 60% of C and 86% of E first surfacing during the elaboration stage.

There were meaningful changes for parents as well. More than half said they learned something new every day, and many discovered emotions they hadn't known about before. The diary also naturally sparked conversations with their children, with fragmentary sharing expanding into richer stories.