Sensing-Enhanced Therapy System for Assessing Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Feasibility Study

Haibin Cai, Yinfeng Fang, Zhaojie Ju, Cristina Costescu, Daniel David, Erik Billing, Tom Ziemke, Serge Thill, Tony Belpaeme, Bram Vanderborght, David Vernon, Kathleen Richardson (+1 others)
2019 IEEE Sensors Journal  
It is evident that recently reported robot-assisted therapy systems for assessment of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) lack autonomous interaction abilities and require significant human resources. This paper proposes a sensing system that automatically extracts and fuses sensory features such as body motion features, facial expressions, and gaze features, further assessing the children behaviours by mapping them to therapist-specified behavioural classes. Experimental results show
more » ... hat the developed system has a capability of interpreting characteristic data of children with ASD, thus has the potential to increase the autonomy of robots under the supervision of a therapist and enhance the quality of the digital description of children with ASD. The research outcomes pave the way to a feasible machine-assisted system for their behaviour assessment.
doi:10.1109/jsen.2018.2877662 fatcat:jku4dmx34vhbrcgvsdm7pxkp64