Eye contact reminder system for people with autism

Avoiding eye contact behavior has been characteristic of individuals with autism. Such behavior prevents intrinsic development of social and communication skills. In this paper we present a directional eye contact reminder system which reminds people with autism to generally focus their eyes in the direction of a human speaker. This device detects a speaker's voice, calculates the sound direction, and directs their eyes by displaying a prompt on the computerized-eyewear which is a Head-Mounted Display, in the direction of the speaker. The experiments demonstrate the feasibility of our prototyping system.

[1]  R. Padmanabhan,et al.  Robust Voice Activity Detection using Group Delay Functions , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Technology.

[2]  Per Holth,et al.  An Operant Analysis of Joint Attention Skills. , 2005 .

[3]  L. O'brien,et al.  Teaching Eye Contact to Children with Autism: A Conceptual Analysis and Single Case Study , 2013 .

[4]  Z. Warren,et al.  Prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder Among Children Aged 8 Years — Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 11 Sites, United States, 2014 , 2018, Morbidity and mortality weekly report. Surveillance summaries.

[5]  C. N. Macrae,et al.  Are You Looking at Me? Eye Gaze and Person Perception , 2002, Psychological science.

[6]  R. Foxx,et al.  Attention training: the use of overcorrection avoidance to increase the eye contact of autistic and retarded children. , 1977, Journal of applied behavior analysis.

[7]  Erik Mayville and James Mulick Behavioral Foundations of Effective Autism Treatment , 2010 .

[8]  Xi Wang,et al.  Eye Contact Conditioning in Autistic Children Using Virtual Reality Technology , 2014, MindCare.

[9]  Ronald W. Schafer,et al.  Introduction to Digital Speech Processing , 2007, Found. Trends Signal Process..

[10]  F. Richard Ferraro,et al.  Behavioral Foundations of Effective Autism Treatment , 2012 .

[11]  K. Dautenhahn,et al.  Towards interactive robots in autism therapy: background, motivation and challenges , 2004 .

[12]  Kerstin Dautenhahn,et al.  Roles and functions of robots in human society: implications from research in autism therapy , 2003, Robotica.

[13]  Hideki Kozima,et al.  Interactive robots for communication-care: a case-study in autism therapy , 2005, ROMAN 2005. IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2005..