A Review of Wearable Tracking and Emotional Monitoring Solutions for Individuals with Autism and Intellectual Disability

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Intellectual Disabilities (ID) affect an increasing proportion of today’s population. Individuals with ASD/ID exhibit frequent forms of challenging behaviours such aggression and wandering off without warning. Wandering or elopement is common among such population and poses a great risk to the individuals and causes significant stress to their caregivers. Concurrent with wandering is sometimes anxiety and stress which may lead to disruptive challenging behaviours emerging from their varying internal emotional states and hyper-sensory to their surroundings. Caregivers and/or family members do need to keep track of such vulnerable population especially the ones with more severe autism/intellectual disabilities. The use of location tracking and emotional monitoring solutions can assist caregivers and family members by complementing their behavioural monitoring and intervention approaches. This paper reviews existing location tracking and physiological monitoring wearable products suited for this population. This can help caregivers and family members select suitable device for the person of concern taking account his/her unique user needs. Keywords-autism; assistive technology, emotional monitoring, intellectual disabilities, patient localisation, wearable sensors.