We present the design of an online social skills development interface for teenagers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The interface is intended to enable private conversation practice anywhere, anytime using a web-browser. Users converse informally with a virtual agent, receiving feedback on nonverbal cues in realtime, and summary feedback. The prototype was developed in consultation with an expert UX designer, two psychologists, and a pediatrician. Using the data from 47 individuals, feedback and dialogue generation were automated using a hidden Markov model and a schema-driven dialogue manager capable of handling multi-topic conversations. We conducted a study with nine high-functioning ASD teenagers. Through a thematic analysis of post-experiment interviews, identified several key design considerations, notably: 1) Users should be fully briefed at the outset about the purpose and limitations of the system, to avoid unrealistic expectations. 2) An interface should incorporate positive acknowledgment of behavior change. 3) Realistic appearance of a virtual agent and responsiveness are important in engaging users. 4) Conversation personalization, for instance in prompting laconic users for more input and reciprocal questions, would help the teenagers engage for longer terms and increase the system's utility. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI .

Phenotype is the set of observable traits of an organism or condition. While advances in genetics, imaging, and molecular biology have improved our understanding of the underlying biology of Parkinson's disease (PD), clinical phenotyping of PD still relies primarily on history and physical examination. These subjective, episodic, categorical assessments are valuable for diagnosis and care but have left gaps in our understanding of the PD phenotype. Sensors can provide objective, continuous, real-world data about the PD clinical phenotype, increase our knowledge of its pathology, enhance evaluation of therapies, and ultimately, improve patient care. In this paper, we explore the concept of deep phenotyping-the comprehensive assessment of a condition using multiple clinical, biological, genetic, imaging, and sensor-based tools-for PD. We discuss the rationale for, outline current approaches to, identify benefits and limitations of, and consider future directions for deep clinical phenotyping.

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There are about 900,000 people with Parkinson's disease (PD) in the United States. Even though there are benefits of early treatment, unfortunately, over 40% of individuals with PD over 65 years old do not see a neurologist. It is often very difficult for these individuals to get to a physician's office for diagnosis and subsequent monitoring. To address this problem, we present PARK, Parkinson's Analysis with Remote Kinetic-tasks. PARK instructs and guides users through six motor tasks and one audio task selected from the standardized MDS-UPDRS rating scale and records their performance via webcam. An initial experiment was conducted with 127 participants with PD and 127 age-matched controls, in which a total of 1,778 video recordings were collected. 90.6% of the PD participants agreed that PARK was easy to use, and 93.7% mentioned that they would use the system in the future. We explored objective differences between those with and without PD. A novel motion feature based on the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of optical flow in a region of interest was designed to quantify these differences in the collected video recordings. Additionally, we found that facial action unit AU4 (brow lowerer) was expressed significantly more often, while AU12 (lip corner puller) was expressed less often in various tasks for participants with PD.

We present a conversational agent designed to provide realistic conversational practice to older adults at risk of isolation or social anxiety, and show the results of a content analysis on a corpus of data collected from experiments with elderly patients interacting with our system. The conversational agent, represented by a virtual avatar, is designed to hold multiple sessions of casual conversation with older adults. Throughout each interaction, the system analyzes the prosodic and nonverbal behavior of users and provides feedback to the user in the form of periodic comments and suggestions on how to improve. Our avatar is unique in its ability to hold natural dialogues on a wide range of everyday topics – 27 topics in three groups, developed in collaboration with a team of gerontologists. The three groups vary in “degrees of intimacy”, and as such in degrees of cognitive difficulty for the user. After collecting data from 9 participants who interacted with the avatar for 7-9 sessions over a period of 3-4 weeks, we present results concerning dialogue behavior and inferred sentiment of the users. Analysis of the dialogues reveals correlations such as greater elaborateness for more difficult topics, increasing elaborateness with successive sessions, stronger sentiments in topics concerned with life goals rather than routine activities, and stronger self-disclosure for more intimate topics. In addition to their intrinsic interest, these results also reflect positively on the sophistication and practical applicability of our dialogue system.

A prevalent symptom of Parkinson’s disease (PD) is hypomimia — reduced facial expressions. In this paper, we present a method for diagnosing PD that utilizes the study of micro-expressions. We analyzed the facial action units (AU) from 1812 videos of 604 individuals (61 with PD and 543 without PD, with a mean age 63.9 y/o, sd. 7.8) collected online through a web-based tool (www.parktest.net). In these videos, participants were asked to make three facial expressions (a smiling, disgusted, and surprised face) followed by a neutral face. Using techniques from computer vision and machine learning, we objectively measured the variance of the facial muscle movements and used it to distinguish between individuals with and without PD. The prediction accuracy using the facial micro-expressions was comparable to methodologies that utilize motor symptoms. Logistic regression analysis revealed that participants with PD had less variance in AU6 (cheek raiser), AU12 (lip corner puller), and AU4 (brow lowerer) than non-PD individuals. An automated classifier using Support Vector Machine was trained on the variances and achieved 95.6% accuracy. Using facial expressions as a future digital biomarker for PD could be potentially transformative for patients in need of remote diagnoses due to physical separation (e.g., due to COVID) or immobility.

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