A Learning System to Support Social and Empathy Disorders Diagnosis through Affective Avatars

Technology-enhanced support for children with Down Syndrome: A systematic literature review

“…Cognition accounted for 12 papers including games for tongue training [109], talking and reading [110,111], language [112], and memory [92,97,113,114]. We also found use of avatars to support emotions [89,115]. Others included comparison of traditional therapy versus Virtual Reality based therapy on performance of children with Down Syndrome [116], and Reflex as a customizable and affordable tool that supported multiple cognitive abilities [94].…”

“…The purpose of this review was to examine the etiology of Down Syndrome only, during the coding process we came across papers that used participants with DS exclusively, and participants with DS in comparison with participant such as Autistic Spectrum Disorder [83][84][85][86][87][88], or compared DS with Intellectual Disability [75,[89][90][91][92], Neurodevelopmental Disorder (NDD) [93][94][95] or DS with Neurotypical Peers (NT) [46,67,75]. These were the broader terms that we came across during the coding process.…”

“…In 26% of the papers either the authors had not mentioned the age, nor number of participants that were recruited for evaluation, nor there was a target audience defined. Paper [89] was the only paper included that tested emotion detection through interaction by three groups falling in three categories C1: Under 12 years -children (10 participants), C2: 12-21 years children and young people (10 participants); C3:22-30 years young people and adults (10 participants).…”

“…There were 4 papers in our corpus with technology support for improving social skills, typically emotions. Training for correct recognition of emotions was provided first through avatars [89,90,115] which incorporates the fun element for children and to sustain their attention for a longer duration than in a typical scenario. One paper attempted to manage behavioural issues observed in SEN children by observing behavioural issues more natural to ASD children with one incident with DS [84].…”

Analyzing and Predicting Empathy in Neurotypical and Nonneurotypical Users with an Affective Avatar

“…In this paper, which is an extension of a previous one [2], we propose an affective avatar, which will engage the user by means of interaction through a tablet, having the result of a human-avatar interaction based on the different emotions shown by the avatar to the different interactions performed by the user. The interactions themselves will later be provided to a learning algorithm to detect empathic or not empathic interaction, which will in turn make it possible to assist in SCD diagnosis.…”