Smartphone Based Autism Social Alert System

Abstract

Abstract-Autism currently affects 1 in every 88 American children impairing their social interactions, communications and daily living. Often, parents, educators, and researchers need to purchase expensive equipment to help autistic children cope with challenges in their daily living. In this paper, we present the Smartphone-Based Autism Social Alert (SASA) system which we design to help such children. The SASA system uses the inexpensive sensors embedded within smartphones to facilitate the study of the autistic children's behaviors by recording and analyzing data collected from such embedded sensors in smartphones carried by autistic children. Our system can automatically detect their stereotypical behaviors such that early interventions can be taken by caregivers or teachers. In addition, the system can correlate environmental sensor data streams, e.g. audio background, with the occurrence of stereotypical behaviors so as to identify potential environmental factors that may trigger such behaviors. We also include some preliminary classification results on the sensor data which we have collected from Androidbased phones using the WEKA J.48 classifier. Our preliminary results show that simple features extracted from accelerometer readings are sufficient to give high accuracy rates when training is performed on a per user per device basis. Our audio classifier which uses 12 MFCC coefficients, average zero crossing rate, and energy can give an accuracy of 78.6% when evaluated using audio traces collected for seven audio categories. Additional extensive experiments will be carried out in the near future at a nearby secondary school for autistic children.

Agency of Autistic Children in Technology Research—A Critical Literature Review

“…Some of the technologies monitor the children's development, e.g., through a portable audio/video recorder [255]. When focusing on the behaviour of children, the resulting technologies might use, for example, sensors in smartphones [61] or use cameras embedded in computers to analyse the children's attention while they interact with a program [175]. All projects monitoring play behaviour use social robots to do so [35,96,268].…”

Assistive technology: Understanding the needs and experiences of individuals with autism spectrum disorder and/or intellectual disability in Ireland and the UK

“…Mobile forms of AT, such as tablet and smartphone devices, are particularly powerful forms of technology that may be used to support the development of scheduling and planning and communication skills. As noted, research, ongoing in both the behavioral and computing sciences, is focused on developing interventions that incorporate ICT based AT with behavioral science towards an individualized adjunct intervention (Chuah & Diblasio, 2012;Dallery et al, 2014;Hidalgo-Mazzei et al, 2015). These interventions are low cost, individualized and may help support individuals between therapy sessions.…”

“…In addition, a study by Chuah and Diblasio (2012) reported on the development of an app that used a smartphone and wearable sensor to detect location and the engagement in stereotypical repetitive movements of individuals with ASD. The app then highlighted where and when these socially stigmatizing behaviors were more likely to occur; information that would allow for these behaviors to be managed better.…”

DTWDIR: An Enhanced DTW Algorithm for Autistic Child Behaviour Monitoring

“…Chuah et al [11] developed Smartphone-Based Autism Social Alert (SASA) for automatically detecting autistic child's stereotypical behaviours early and send alert to caregivers. They recognized audio background with the occurrence of stereotypical behaviours so as to identify potential environmental factors that may trigger such behaviours.…”