One of the difficulties of children with autism (Kener syndrome) is their difficulty understanding social cues. This difficulty characterizes most of the spectrum, including those at its upper end. A new article published very recently in the journal NPJ Digital Medicine investigated the ability of a smartphone application based on Google Glass to help recognize facial expressions in autistic children in collaboration with their parents.
One of the difficulties of children with autism (Kener syndrome) is their difficulty understanding social cues. This difficulty characterizes most of the spectrum, including those at its upper end. A new article published very recently in the journal NPJ Digital Medicine investigated the ability of a smartphone application based on Google Glass to help recognize facial expressions in autistic children in collaboration with their parents.
During the study, 14 families were equipped with smart glasses for about 10 weeks, with each family containing an autistic child aged 3-17 years. The families used the device for at least three weekly sessions of 20 minutes each. During these sessions, the parents presented the autistic child, under appropriate guidance, eight main facial expressions (happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise, fear, neutral expression and contempt), while the glasses recorded the field of vision and gave visual and audio information about the environmental interactions according to the information received in the app.
The application used three approaches in order to improve the children's ability to recognize facial expressions - "free play", in which the software provides the child with a hint every time an emotion is detected in the face of a person in the visual field; "Guess the emotion", in which the parent shows one of the eight facial expressions mentioned and the child tries to guess the expression, and "Capture the smile", in which children provide clues about the emotion they want to produce, until the parent expresses it.
The results of the study revealed that the children's scores on the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS-2) improved significantly. In this index, the higher the score, the more severe the disorder of autism and it turned out that the children decreased on average by 7.38 points during the study period. In six of the 14 children, the severity of their disorder actually decreased from a diagnostic point of view, so that those who were classified as having a severe disorder, were currently classified as having a moderate disorder, those who were classified as moderate moved to a mild level, and those who were classified as mild moved to normal functioning. Also, 12 families reported a significant improvement in eye contact and improvement in social behavior in the autistic child.
A follow-up study of this experiment has already been completed and this time on a population of 74 children. The successes in these experiments can open the door to "games" within the family with technological accessories in order to improve the situation of the autistic children, not only in social areas but also in other areas of life.
Link to the article about the research - the nature website
A little about autism and the impaired ability to recognize social cues
One response
cool
Where can I purchase the glasses?