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Attention analysis in interactive software for children with autism

Published: 23 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

This work is a part of an ongoing project that focuses on potential applications of an interactive system that helps children with autism. Autism is classified as a neurodevelopmental disorder that manifests itself in markedly abnormal social interaction, communication ability, patterns of interests, and patterns of behavior [1]. Children with autism are socially impaired and usually do not attend to the people around them. An interesting point which characterized children with autism is that they are unable to choose which event is more or less important. As a consequence they are often saturated because of too many stimuli and thus they adopt an extremely repetitive, unusual, self-injurious, or aggressive behaviour. Recently, a new trend of using human computer interface (HCI) technology and computer science in the treatment of autism has emerged [2, 3]. The platform we developed helps children with autism to focus their attention on a specific task. In this article, we only present the attention analysis system which is a part of a more general system that used a multi-agent architecture [4]. Each task proposed on our system fit to each child, is reproducible and evolutive following a specific scenario defined by the expert. This scenario takes into account age, ability, and degree of autism of each child. In order to focus a child's attention onto the relevant object, our system displays or plays specific stimulus; once again the specific stimulus is defined for each child. Symbol or sound represents an emotional and satisfaction value for the child. The major problem is to define the correct moment when the system has to (dis)play this signal. We tackle this problem by defining a robust measure of attention. This measure is defined by analyzing the gaze direction and the face orientation, and incorporating the child's specific profile. Following expert directives, our system helps children to categorize elementary perception (strong, smooth, quick, slow, big, small...). Our objective is that children re-use these classifications in others situations.

References

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Fred R. Volkmar. Handbook of Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorders. 3th edition, 2005.
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Hossein Mobahi and Karrie G. Karahalios. Hci applications for aiding children with mental disorders. ACM Crossroads, Special Issue on Human-Computer Interaction, 12(2):8{12, Winter 2005.
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Karim Sehaba Vincent Courboulay and Pascal Estraillier. Interactive system by observation and analysis of behaviour for children with autism. Technology and Disability, 2006.
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K. Sehaba, P. Estraillier, and D. Lambert. Interactive educational games for autistic children with agent-based system. 4th International Conference on Entertainment Computing, page 422--432, September 2005.
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M. Fabri and D.J. Moore. The use of emotionally expressive avatars in collaborative virtual environments. In Proceeding of Symposium on Empathic Interaction with Synthetic Characters, held at Artificial Intelligence and Social Behaviour Convention 2005 (AISB 2005), University of Hertfordshire, 2005.
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K. Dautenhahn. Design issues on interactive environments for children with autism. In Proceeding 3rd Intl Conf. Disability, Virtual Reality & Assoc, page 153159, Alghero, Italy, 2000.
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J. Montemayor. Physical programming : tools for kindergarten children to author physical interactive environments. Thse de doctorat, department of computer science, University of Maryland, USA, 2003.
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Thomas E. Brown. Attention Deifcit Disorder: The Unfocused Mind in Children and Adults. Yale University Press, September 2005.

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cover image ACM Conferences
Assets '06: Proceedings of the 8th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
October 2006
316 pages
ISBN:1595932909
DOI:10.1145/1168987
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 23 October 2006

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Author Tags

  1. attention analysis
  2. behavior study
  3. children with autism

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  • (2022)Understanding Design Preferences for Sensory-Sensitive Earcons with Neurodivergent IndividualsProceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3517428.3550365(1-4)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022
  • (2021)Designing Sensory and Social Tools for Neurodivergent Individuals in Social Media EnvironmentsProceedings of the 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3441852.3476546(1-5)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2021
  • (2020)Interactive Technologies and Autism, Second EditionSynthesis Lectures on Assistive, Rehabilitative, and Health-Preserving Technologies10.2200/S00988ED2V01Y202002ARH0139:1(i-229)Online publication date: 13-May-2020
  • (2020)Evaluation of digital games for autistic children using heuristics and observation testsProceedings of the 19th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3424953.3426641(1-10)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2020
  • (2019)Augmented Interaction Systems for Supporting Autistic Children. Evolution of a Multichannel Expressive Tool: The SEMI Project Feasibility StudyApplied Sciences10.3390/app91530819:15(3081)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2019
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  • (2018)A Step towards Identifying the Sound Preferences of Children with AutismProceedings of the 12th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare10.1145/3240925.3240958(158-167)Online publication date: 21-May-2018
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