Sensing-Enhanced Therapy System for Assessing Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Feasibility Study
Abstract
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 behaviors by mapping them to therapist-specified behavioral classes. Experimental results show that 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 behavior assessment.
Publication Date
2019-02-15
Publication Title
IEEE Sensors Journal
Volume
19
Issue
4
ISSN
1530-437X
Embargo Period
9999-12-31
Keywords
autism spectrum disorders, autonomy, Sensing-enhanced, therapy
First Page
1508
Last Page
1518
Recommended Citation
Cai, H., Fang, Y., Jue, Z., Costescu, C., David, D., Billing, E., Ziemke, T., Thill, S., Belpaeme, T., Vanderborght, B., Vernon, D., Richardson, K., & Liu, H. (2019) 'Sensing-Enhanced Therapy System for Assessing Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Feasibility Study', IEEE Sensors Journal, 19(4), pp. 1508-1518. Available at: 10.1109/JSEN.2018.2877662" >https://doi.org/10.1109/JSEN.2018.2877662