یک رویکرد اینترنت اشیا برای خواندن احساسات کودکان مبتلا به اختلال طیف اوتیسم An Internet of Things Approach to “Read” the Emotion of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

20.1 Introduction Following the discussion on the contributions of Internet of Things (IoT) in health science and management in previous chapters, this chapter describes a prototype of IoT system designed specifically to help children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who are notoriously known to lack some social skills. Specifically, the application is designed to help both users with or without ASD to recognize their emotion in order to facilitate social interaction. Since the effectiveness of the prototype has not been clinically tested, readers are advised to consider it as another future IoT application in health and learning management. In this chapter, we describe the design and development of such an IoT prototype. During a social interaction, it is important for all participants to interpret correctly the emotional nature of the message being communicated in order to avoid misunderstanding. Prior researches in the past decades have pointed out the lack of emotion recognition skills and social interaction skills among children and adults with ASD and the possible causal link between the former and the latter (Harms et al., 2010, Baron-Cohen et al., 1993). Since all participants in a social interaction should be held accountable for correctly interpreting other’s emotional state, the ability of neurotypical (NT) individuals to recognize the emotion of children with ASD should also be evaluated. A small number of recent works began to study these issues by empirically evaluating the emotion expressiveness of individuals with ASD (Brewer et al., 2016; Macdonald et al., 1989; Faso et al., 2015; Stagg et al., 2014). However, the research on the ability of NT individuals in “reading”the emotions of those with ASD is still rare. The study involving advanced technology is even rarer, appealing, and yet seems to be more feasible with the overwhelming focus on and success of sensing and wearable technologies. In particular, would it be possible for a collection of sensors and wearable devices acting as“eyes” and “ears”to collectively “label”the emotion of individuals situated in a social environment engaging in natural interactions? Drawn from earlier studies on psychology that have successfully linked emotions with expressive body movements (Boone and Cunningham, 1998; De Meijer, 1989), researchers have advanced our understandings of discern emotion of NT individuals from such multimodal data, including facial expression, hand gestures, body movements, and so on (Camurri et al., 2003; Kapur et al., 2005; Gunes and Piccardi, 2007; Robinson, 2014). However, there is a lack of work to assist NT individuals to understand the emotional states of those with ASD under natural social interactions (Tang, 2016), which motivates this study.