Abstract
Although standard behavioral interventions for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are effective therapies for social deficits, they face criticism for being time-intensive and overdependent on specialists. Earlier starting age of therapy is a strong predictor of later success, but waitlists for therapies can be 18 months long. To address these complications, we developed Superpower Glass, a machine-learning-assisted software system that runs on Google Glass and an Android smartphone, designed for use during social interactions. This pilot exploratory study examines our prototype tool’s potential for social-affective learning for children with autism. We sent our tool home with 14 families and assessed changes from intake to conclusion through the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS-2), a facial affect recognition task (EGG), and qualitative parent reports. A repeated-measures one-way ANOVA demonstrated a decrease in SRS-2 total scores by an average 7.14 points (F(1,13) = 33.20, p = <.001, higher scores indicate higher ASD severity). EGG scores also increased by an average 9.55 correct responses (F(1,10) = 11.89, p = <.01). Parents reported increased eye contact and greater social acuity. This feasibility study supports using mobile technologies for potential therapeutic purposes.
Highlights
Significant decreases in SRS-2 total scores and subscores, concomitant increases in emotion recognition measured by Emotion Guessing Game (EGG), and responses to semi-structured interviews support the hypothesis that the use of Superpower Glass may be an effective and practical wearable therapy intervention for children with autism that can increase social skills, facial affect recognition, and eye contact
The significant changes on the evaluations found in this study were not compared to a control group, and we cannot determine whether it was the system itself, a maturation effect, or another aspect of the intervention process that resulted in the changes observed
A follow-on study with a larger, randomized participant population can determine these effects and confirm our hypothesis that our Superpower Glass system can lead to sustained gains in social acuity
Summary
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) struggle to recognize facial expressions, make eye contact, and engage in social interactions.[1,2] An estimated 1 in 68 children have an ASD, and many can have dramatic improvements if social skills are taught intensively from an early age.[1,2,3,4,5] Children with ASD have demonstrated deficits in facial processing abilities, such as distinguishing fear from surprise and identifying subtler emotions.[6,7,8,9] Children struggle with facial engagement and eye contact.[10,11] Teaching these skills to children with autism is important for social development and is closely linked with empathy.[12,13,14,15,16]Today’s standard for treatment of these core ASD deficits focuses on a form of behavioral therapy known as applied behavioral analysis (ABA).[17,18] ABA therapy is effective in increasing IQ, improving eye contact, face-to-face gaze, and emotion recognition, children who receive ABA often struggle to generalize learned behaviors to natural interactions and are dependent on prompts.[17,19] Therapies called naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions (NDBIs) promote better generalization of newly learned skills due to their integration into the child’s natural everyday interactions.[15,20,21] the delivery of behavioral interventions like ABA and NDBIs is bottlenecked by an increasing imbalance between the availability of behavioral therapists and the number of children who must receive care.[22,23].
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