Digitized ADOS: Social Interactions beyond the Limits of the Naked Eye

Abstract

The complexity and non-linear dynamics of socio-motor phenomena underlying social interactions are often missed by observation methods that attempt to capture, describe, and rate the exchange in real time. Unknowingly to the rater, socio-motor behaviors of a dyad exert mutual influence over each other through subliminal mirroring and shared cohesiveness that escape the naked eye. Implicit in these ratings nonetheless is the assumption that the other participant of the social dyad has an identical nervous system as that of the interlocutor, and that sensory-motor information is processed similarly by both agents’ brains. What happens when this is not the case? We here use the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) to formally study social dyadic interactions, at the macro- and micro-level of behaviors, by combining observation with digital data from wearables. We find that integrating subjective and objective data reveals fundamentally new ways to improve standard clinical tools, even to differentiate females from males using the digital version of the test. More generally, this work offers a way to turn a traditional, gold-standard clinical instrument into an objective outcome measure of human social behaviors and treatment effectiveness.

Precision Autism: Genomic Stratification of Disorders Making Up the Broad Spectrum May Demystify Its “Epidemic Rates”

“…Fur-thermore, digitizing them with wearable biosensors, captures the fundamental differences in females, saves time, thus being less taxing on the children and offering a new level of finer granularity of physiological function, well beyond the limits of the naked eye. As such, digitized dyadic interactions during the ADOS opens a new avenue for precision (physiological) phenotyping that, when combined with genomics results here, stands to reformulate autism research under the tenets of Precision Medicine [8,25].…”

“…Yet, motor features derived from endogenous neural signals in motor patterns, do identify the female phenotype [4][5][6][7]. This is the case even when digitizing the current clinical criteria that would otherwise miss females because of exclusive reliance on external observation [8,9]. Likewise, subtle cultural biases built into the social-appropriateness criteria of the current instruments skew identification of underserved populations [1].…”

Optimal time lags from causal prediction model help stratify and forecast nervous system pathology

“…Informed consent was obtained from the participants according to our Rutgers and Columbia University IRB-approved protocols. Different aspects of these data unrelated to stochastic gait analyses, were previously published 7 , 28 , 61 , 62 .…”

Precision Autism: Genomic Stratification of Disorders Making Up the Broad Spectrum May Demystify its “Epidemic Rates”

“…Yet, motor features derived from endogenous neural signals in motor patterns, do identify the female phenotype [3][4][5][6]. This is the case even when digitizing the current clinical criteria that would otherwise miss females because of exclusive reliance on external observation [7,8]. Likewise, subtle cultural biases built into the socialappropriateness criteria of the current instruments skew identification of underserved populations [1].…”

“…Furthermore, digitizing them with wearable biosensors, captures the fundamental differences in females, saves time, thus being less taxing on the children and offering a new level of finer granularity of physiological function, well beyond the limits of the naked eye. As such, digitized dyadic interactions during the ADOS opens a new avenue for precision (physiological) phenotyping that, when combined with genomics results here, stands to reformulate autism research under the tenets of Precision Medicine[25,64].…”