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

Abstract

In recent times, diagnosing and treating different health issues have improved greatly with the help of technology, with an example being cognitive health issues. Despite this, there is still a difference between how the technology is working towards it and the actual potential that can be achieved. In this paper, we propose a mobile application with an affective avatar, encompassed in the area of serious games, which will obtain information related to the interactions performed by the users. There are a total of 50 users, of neurotypical and nonneurotypical backgrounds, with the latter being people with Down syndrome and intellectual disability. Based on collected data from the different users interacting with the avatar in a mobile device, we analyzed the results to obtain a ground truth about prototypic empathic interactions and feed those interactions to a learning algorithm to support the diagnosis process and therapy treatment of empathy and socialization issues.

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

“…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.…”

“…We found AT being used for supporting urban mobility in [18][19][20][21]118,119]. There was a single paper looking at correctly detecting emotions using avatars [90], and one paper [91] for linguistic and last but not least one paper [120] for design of a software development methodology as guidelines for development of AT. A total of 6 papers makes use of Tangible User Interfaces (TUI), and 5 of them focusing on improving cognition, in particular literacy [62,95,99,121], and one study [87] describes the design of Trollskogen ("The Troll Forest") to improve, enhance, and allow for exercise of social communication skills via multitouch table tops in three phases.…”

An Affective and Cognitive Toy to Support Mood Disorders

“…One of those agents can be virtual, and can be interacted with in a variety of ways. This can be through tactile interaction [25,26], where the participant interacted with the avatar through a tablet; through text [27], where students write to an avatar designed to help students with stress management; or through body movement by detecting apathetic or euphoric dancing and modulating it through a virtual human [28]. From these works, we can observe that there are different applications that can be done with virtual avatars, through different mediums.…”

Affective Embodied Agents and Their Effect on Decision Making

“…In another study [10], the population was formed by older adults, to assert if the presence of an avatar that showed emotion improved interaction. Finally, in [11,12], users interacted through touch with a virtual avatar, who would express different emotions depending on the nature of the touch.…”