Robots: Autistic children’s best friends
In this post we will explain how EAI can solve communication issues with autistic children. To do that, we must first understand what Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is and how it affects the people that live with it.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 1 in 160 children has an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). As some of you may know, ASD is a developmental disorder that affects communication and behaviour in children as young as 2 months old. The biggest challenge for people, especially kids, diagnosed with ASD is to associate facial expressions with emotions. For instance, a child with ASD can have a hard time determining whether a person is happy or upset when solely relying on facial expressions. This limits his ability to participate in society because he can’t visually interpret what people are feeling and doesn’t know what facial expressions he should make to tell people what his emotions are. This breakage in communication is what often leads people with ADS to not look at other people’s faces when talking.
While one of the major goals of behavioural therapy with autistic children is to give them the tools needed to express and read emotions in a way that helps them communicate and interact with other people, no major improvements have yet been recorded. The reason behind this is the human aspect of therapists. As a matter of fact, when a human teaches typical expressions to a child, it unknowingly emphasizes facial movements which may seem minimal to typically developing people but make a huge difference to autistic children. For example, when a therapist tries to teach the “happy face” to an autistic child, he might raise his eyebrows, which most of you won’t notice, but for someone with ASD, a smile with raised eyebrows is a totally different expression than just a smile. Another issue is that the number of human therapists is not keeping up with the increase in diagnosis, which means many children with ASD can’t work and improve their communication skills and keep being isolated from others. Finally, the limited time autistic children spend with a therapist as well as the sense of constraint that comes with having to regularly meet a therapist limits the outcome of the sessions and therefore the ability of children with ADS to learn how to socially interact.
Here comes the good part…
Thanks to the emergence of Emotional Artificial Intelligence, new techniques are currently being tested to help kids with ASD overcome their communication difficulties… and the results are promising.
The way these technologies work is simple and their applications numerous. Let’s start with the most fun one: robots. This won’t come as a surprise; all kids love robots. Well, autistic children are even more fascinated by them and using them to help children with ASD learn facial expressions significantly improves the learning experience (Spectrum). The way this work is that robots replace human therapists because they can be programmed and can display the exact same facial expression for each specific emotion. This makes it easier for autistic children to precisely differentiate facial expressions from each other and gives no room for confusion as the facial expression linked to an emotion will always be the “correct” one. Using robots to teach has other benefits such as helping autistic kids with severe attention become very attentive or even enable non-verbal autistic children to interact more with the robot and talk about the robot to their parents after the session.
Another application of the technology is in smart glasses. This brings the technology to a whole other dimension as it could be used in real-time to help children with autism understand emotions of the people in front of them by scanning their face with facial recognition. Emotion recognition done by these glasses could help kids recognize social cues in natural environments. A project called Glass Project is using facial recognition software and running on Google Glass.
Finally, applications have been developed to help children with ASD associate facial expressions with emotions in the form of a game. Using smart glasses an autistic child sees an emoji floating on both sides of someone’s face and tilts his head to choose the one that matches the facial expression.
The results of Emotional Artificial Intelligence in helping children with ASD are very promising and will have a huge impact on their lives through more social integration. The future step of this technology is surely to implement it at a larger scale and make tools like robots or smart glasses accessible to every household with an autistic child.
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