HCC: Collaborative Research: Social-Emotional Technologies for Autism Spectrum Disorders

该项目是马萨诸塞州理工学院媒体实验室和格罗登中心的合作项目，旨在开发和评估可穿戴社交情感技术，帮助高功能自闭症或自闭症患者获得对社交领域的亲和力，并提高他们的整体社交能力。该项目将开发第一个可穿戴相机系统，能够在实时人类互动中感知和可视化社交情感信息。使用小型可穿戴摄像头和视频模式分析算法，该系统分析佩戴者或交互伙伴的视频，并以多个粒度（面部动作，交流面部或头部姿势以及情绪）对其进行标记。可穿戴系统旨在：（1）促进社会情绪线索的学习和系统化;（2）促进自我反思和观点采择;（3）允许佩戴者研究微妙的非语言线索，并与同龄人，家庭成员和照顾者分享经验;（4）在机器中贡献新的计算模型和社会情绪智力理论。一项临床研究将比较可穿戴系统与目前自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）金标准干预措施的疗效。共同设计和使用技术的参与式方法借鉴了ASD患者的经验及其系统化社会互动的解决方案，从而使他们能够加强他们的关系，同时参与下一代社会发展，情感智能技术。该项目将为开发机器智能这一艰巨挑战做出重大贡献，互动当人或机器无法感知、理解和处理社会情感线索时，他们与他人互动和学习的能力就会受到阻碍。这项跨学科工作的结果可以用于人机交互、机器人技术和具有社交情商的技术。这项研究还将为研究人员提供一种新的工具来研究实验室环境之外的非语言交流。这个项目汇集了自闭症研究和情感计算的重叠和融合的目标和挑战，这两个领域已经是跨学科的，并展示了合作如何导致几个互利的结果？从开发新的工具来帮助ASD患者理解和在社交情感世界中发挥作用，到开发新的计算模型和理论，使技术能够为使用者提供更好的整体体验。这项工作还通过让学生和ASD患者参与尖端科学研究来促进他们的培训和教育。

This project is a collaborative effort between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory and the Groden Center to develop and evaluate wearable social-emotional technology that helps individuals with high-functioning autism or Asperger syndrome acquire an affinity for the social domain and improve their overall social abilities. The project will develop the first wearable camera system capable of perceiving and visualizing social-emotional information in real-time human interaction. Using a small wearable camera and video-pattern analysis algorithms, the system analyzes video of the wearer or interaction partner and tags it at multiple granularities (facial actions, communicative facial or head gestures, and emotions). The wearable system aims to: (1) facilitate learning and systemizing of social-emotional cues; (2) promote self-reflection and perspective-taking; (3) allow wearers to study subtle nonverbal cues and share experiences with peers, family members, and caregivers; and (4) contribute new computational models and theories of social-emotional intelligence in machines. A clinical study will compare the efficacy of the wearable system to current gold standard interventions for autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A participatory approach to the co-design and use of technology draws on the experiences of individuals with ASD and their solutions to systematizing social interactions, thereby empowering them to enhance their relationships, while participating in the development of next-generation social-emotional intelligent technologies.The project will make significant contributions to the difficult challenge of developing machine intelligence that is robust at handling human social interaction. When people or machines fail to perceive, understand, and act on social-emotional cues they are hindered in their ability to interact with and learn from others. The results of this interdisciplinary work can be leveraged in human-computer interaction, robotics, and technologies with social-emotional intelligence. The research will also provide investigators with a new tool to study nonverbal communication outside of laboratory settings. This project brings together the overlapping and converging goals and challenges of autism research and affective computing, both already interdisciplinary in nature, and demonstrates how a collaboration could lead to several mutually beneficial outcomes ? from developing new tools to assist people with ASD in understanding and functioning in the social-emotional world, to developing new computational models and theories that enable technology to provide an overall better experience to those who use it. This work also promotes the training and education of students and people with ASD by involving them in cutting-edge scientific research.