Abstract
Recent improvements in the field of assistive technologies have led to innovative solutions aiming at increasing the capabilities of people with disability, helping them in daily activities with applications that span from cognitive impairments to developmental disabilities. In particular, in the case of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), the need to obtain active feedback in order to extract subsequently meaningful data becomes of fundamental importance. In this work, a study about the possibility of understanding the visual exploration in children with ASD is presented. In order to obtain an automatic evaluation, an algorithm for free (i.e., without constraints, nor using additional hardware, infrared (IR) light sources or other intrusive methods) gaze estimation is employed. Furthermore, no initial calibration is required. It allows the user to freely rotate the head in the field of view of the sensor, and it is insensitive to the presence of eyeglasses, hats or particular hairstyles. These relaxations of the constraints make this technique particularly suitable to be used in the critical context of autism, where the child is certainly not inclined to employ invasive devices, nor to collaborate during calibration procedures.The evaluation of children’s gaze trajectories through the proposed solution is presented for the purpose of an Early Start Denver Model (ESDM) program built on the child’s spontaneous interests and game choice delivered in a natural setting.
Highlights
Recent improvements in the field of assistive technologies have led to innovative solutions aiming at increasing the capabilities of people with disability, helping them in daily activities with applications that span from cognitive impairments to developmental disabilities [1,2]
It proposes an unobtrusive technique to estimate the gaze ray; the proposed technique was quantitatively evaluated on both adults and children; qualitative evaluation was performed on children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in a treatment room equipped with a closet containing toys properly disposed by the therapists; the children were asked to explore the closet’s content and to pick up a toy that would be used during the subsequent therapeutic session; the system supplies gaze-tracks, hit-maps and overall statistics that can be exploited by the therapist to better perform the behavioral analysis of the individuals;
Importantly, it should be kept in mind that the proposed approach has been designed for the specific task of helping the understanding of visual exploration in natural contexts, where usually the different areas of interest are not very close in space, and each of them has a dimension related to objects in the scene
Summary
Recent improvements in the field of assistive technologies have led to innovative solutions aiming at increasing the capabilities of people with disability, helping them in daily activities with applications that span from cognitive impairments to developmental disabilities [1,2]. Due to a lack of comprehensive eye-movement modeling techniques, it is currently unknown whether these behavioral effects are evident during scene viewing [7] For this reason, there is a thriving scientific activity aimed at defining methods to analyze eye-tracking time-course data, enabling detailed characterization of viewing strategies. Behavior imaging technology can play several roles in support of a screening instrument It can provide cost-effective tools for managing large collections of video and other data sources recorded during screening sessions.
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