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 .
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.
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