An Intelligent Three Dimensional Learning Environment for Enhancing Social Communication Skills in Infants and Toddlers

项目摘要 自闭症谱系障碍(ASD)是一种常见且代价高昂的神经发育障碍，其核心是 与社会沟通有关的缺陷。越来越多的经验支持表明，早期干预 可以显著提高特定的早期社交技能(即共同关注和社交定向)，以及 这种改进在一定程度上促进了其他关键发展领域的改进，包括广泛的 社会和语言结果。不幸的是，许多家庭很难获得适当、有效的服务 由于资源限制，在年轻时提供早期干预服务，包括：获得服务的机会有限， 与识别/治疗、有限数量的专家提供者以及障碍有关的延误和等待 与治疗费用有关。迫切需要开发新的工具和范例，以 有助于在资源紧张的系统中促进对强大干预措施的获取。一项潜在的新技术 范型包括试图利用复杂技术平台的能力来解决ASD 担忧。当前研究的主要目标是提炼、增强和测试创新的、 专为解决早期社交通信而设计的智能技术体系结构和系统 自闭症儿童的脆弱性。我们明确不建议将此技术作为独立干预 也不是作为现有的必要干预和晚年护理的替代。相反，我们将其作为一种 对一种新的技术工具和范式的批判性测试，用于思考高级早期检测和行动 关于早期社交问题和自闭症。我们将测试我们创新的三个人的能力- 维度智能学习环境，检测并有意义地响应核心社交交流 在照顾者互动期间表现出的行为。简单地说，环境将被设计成帮助年轻人 孩子们更经常对他们的名字做出反应，跟随凝视和常见的手势，并协调社会注意力 在与照顾者的互动中。未来将严格学习和理解该系统的支持能力 这些早期的关键社交技能可能会为截然不同的未来奠定基础 干预措施正在接近。在当前的工作中，我们将首先对我们现有的智能 技术架构，目前能够实时检测和推断社会关注度以及 根据此检测提供提示，以创建强大的技术和社会融合 学习平台。然后，我们将评估这项技术流畅和自主运行的能力 一份临床样本。这项研究的预期收益可能是巨大的。这将是第一次允许 用于系统评估创新的、技术中介的ASD干预平台 在发展的关键时刻，可以很容易地转化为有意义的现实世界使用的幼儿。

Project Summary Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a common and costly neurodevelopmental disorder with core deficits related to social communication. There is growing empirical support suggesting that early intervention can significantly improve specific early social communication skills (i.e., joint attention and social orienting) and that such improvements partially mediate improvements in other critical developmental areas, including broad social and language outcomes. Unfortunately, many families struggle greatly to access appropriate, effective early intervention services at young ages due to resource limitations, including: limited access to services, delays and waits related to identification/treatment, a limited number of expert providers, as well as barriers related to the cost of treatment. There is an urgent need for the development of new tools and paradigms that can help advance access to powerful interventions across resource-strained systems. One potential new paradigm involves attempting to harness the abilities of sophisticated technological platforms to address ASD concerns. The primary goal of the current research is to refine, augment, and test the ability of an innovative, intelligent technological architecture and system specifically designed to address early social communication vulnerabilities in children with ASD. We explicitly do not propose this technology as a stand-alone intervention nor as a replacement for existing necessary intervention and care at later ages. Rather, we propose it as a critical test of a new technological tool and paradigm for thinking about advanced early detection and action regarding early social communication concerns and ASD. We will test the ability of our innovative three- dimensional intelligent learning environment to detect and meaningfully respond to core social communication behaviors evidenced during caregiver interactions. Simply, the environment will be designed to help young children more often respond to their names, follow gaze and common gestures, and coordinate social attention in interactions with their caregivers. Future rigorous study and understanding of this system’s ability to bolster these early pivotal social communication skills could lay the groundwork for radically different future intervention approaches. In the current work, we will first refine and augment our existing intelligent technological architecture, currently capable of detecting and inferring social attention in real-time as well as providing prompts based on this detection, to create a robust and powerful blended technological and social learning platform. We will then evaluate the ability of this technology to operate fluidly and autonomously with a clinical sample. The expected benefit of this research could be tremendous. It would, for the first time, allow for the systematic evaluation of an innovative, technologically-mediated ASD intervention platform for very young children that could readily translate into meaningful real-world use at a critical point in development.