Fostering Emotion Recognition in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Facial expressions are of utmost importance in social interactions, allowing communicative prompts for a speaking turn and feedback. Nevertheless, not all have the ability to express themselves socially and emotionally in verbal and non-verbal communication. In particular, individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are characterized by impairments in social communication, repetitive patterns of behaviour, and restricted activities or interests. In the literature, the use of robotic tools is reported to promote social interaction with children with ASD. The main goal of this work is to develop a system capable of automatic detecting emotions through facial expressions and interfacing them with a robotic platform (Zeno R50 Robokind® robotic platform, named ZECA) in order to allow social interaction with children with ASD. ZECA was used as a mediator in social communication activities. The experimental setup and methodology for a real-time facial expression (happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and neutral) recognition system was based on the Intel® RealSense™ 3D sensor and on facial features extraction and multiclass Support Vector Machine classifier. The results obtained allowed to infer that the proposed system is adequate in support sessions with children with ASD, giving a strong indication that it may be used in fostering emotion recognition and imitation skills.

A bibliometric analysis of research trends of artificial intelligence in the treatment of autistic spectrum disorders

“…In recent years, the incidence of ASD in children has been on the rise, which may be related to the improvement of parents' awareness of the disease and the progress of medical diagnosis, early screening and intervention are beneficial to the rehabilitation of ASD ( 47 , 48 ). “Humanoid Robot” is the keyword with the highest burst intensity, and more and more studies have shown that intelligent robots can help improve the emotional cognition ability of ASD patients ( 49 ), social interaction ability ( 50 ), joint attention ( 13 ). More interestingly, ASD patients seem to have a higher affinity and acceptance of intelligent robots than human therapists ( 37 , 51 ).…”

In the wild Affect Analysis of Children with ASD using Heart rate

“…Emotion recognition has been applied by many research works to improve the interaction of children with ASD and social robots [6, [24][25][26]. Different modalities, such as facial expressions [7][8][9][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33], body posture [7,34], gestures [10], skin conductance [35,36], respiration [11], and temperature [12] have been used to perform emotion analysis of children with ASD. Heart rate is also used to recognize the emotion of children with ASD, but these methods use HR as an auxiliary signal that is combined with other modalities such as skin conductance [35] or with body posture [7].…”

Automatic Emotion Recognition in Children with Autism: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The emotions were grouped regarding their similarity. [21,24] attention (1): [25] bored (1): [25] fear-related 16 fear ( 12): [17,[26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] anxiety (3): [20,22,25] trepidation (1): [37] joy-related 21 joy ( 5): [21,[26][27][28][29] liking (3): [19,20,22] happiness (12): [17,24,25,[30][31][32][33][34][35][37][38][39] smile (1): [40] relaxation (1): [37] There are studies that treat attention, engagement, involvement, and boredom as emotional states. They are more like mental states; however, they are emotion-related and were used in the context of emotion recognition in the analyzed papers.…”

“…joy 21 [17,[19][20][21][22][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] anger 12 [17,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33]35,36,38,39] fear 12 [17,[26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] disgust 7 [17,25,27,29,32,35,36] sadness 16 [17,…”

“…Number of Papers Papers joy 3 [19,20,22] joy, neutral 2 [21,24] joy, sadness 2 [21,37] joy, fear, sadness 2 [26,34] joy, disgust, sadness, neutral 1 [25] joy, anger, sadness, neutral 2 [38,39] joy, anger, fear, sadness, neutral 2 [28,30] joy, anger, fear, disgust, sadness, surprise 1 [17] joy, anger, fear, sadness, surprise, neutral 2 [31,33] joy, anger, fear, disgust, sadness, neutral 1 [36] joy, anger, fear, disgust, sadness, surprise, netural 4 [27,29,32,35] In some papers, only two-class recognition was performed. In those papers, joy is recognized as a class combined with no-joy in three papers, with a neutral state in two papers, and with sadness in two papers.…”