A Wearable Social Interaction Aid for Children with Autism

Over 1 million children under the age of 17 in the US have been identified with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). These children struggle to recognize facial expressions, make eye contact, and engage in social interactions. Gaining these skills requires intensive behavioral interventions that are often expensive, difficult to access, and inconsistently administered.nWe have developed a system to automate facial expression recognition that runs on wearable glasses and delivers real time social cues, with the goal of creating a behavioral aid for children with ASD that maximizes behavioral feedback while minimizing the distractions to the child. This paper describes the design of our system and interface decisions resulting from initial observations gathered during multiple preliminary trials.