Autism Spectrum Condition Multimodal Embodiment Open Repository (ASCMEOR)

Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) is still very unknown. As its name depicts it covers a very broad range of conditions that makes it difficult to define and deal with. Important research is being undertaken in genetics to try to understand its origin, cause and typification but no major advances have been made yet.

In the meantime, ASC people need pragmatic solutions to help them in a number of aspects of their daily lives, such as social interaction. ICT has become an important source of intervention and therapeutic tools in the last 10 years. There is a complete lack of sharing of data from trials of ICT tools for ASC. This data could be useful to many researchers to compare results and to build research in different directions from that same data. Within the available ICT tools Embodied Interaction is increasingly showing its potential in ASC. Data from these tools is multimodal in nature and is hence complex to store and analyze.

In our project we investigated a technological system, a full-body interactive Mixed Reality (MR) experience, to understand how full-body interactive systems can help children with Autism improve in social initiation behaviors. The approach of our project was to compare results from our MR experience with a typical LEGO based social intervention, where both mediate a face-to-face play session between an ASC child and a non-ASC child.

The project created a database called ASCMEOR which is a reference database of multimodal data from sessions of ASC children and youngsters using ICT therapy and intervention tools. This is the first time that this type of data is collected from ASC children interacting with complex ICT systems in a database and shared with experts around the world.

As a result of a collaboration with the “Multidisciplinary Unit on Autism Spectrum Disorder” of the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu, the unit provided links to the end users (i.e. high-functioning ASC children) on a local basis in the city of Barcelona. The demography was defined as children and young teenagers (8-12 years old). Participants had been formally diagnosed with ASC as determined by the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) module 3, which is designed for young people with verbal fluency, with a minimum diagnosed severity of 4. Verbal fluency being essential to achieve the level of collaboration required to play the game without the help of a psychologist or parent. As a measure to prevent problems playing or comprehending the game, both the ASC and non-ASC children, had to have a minimum IQ of 70 according to the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) and were screened for epilepsy. All procedures performed were in accordance with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards and ethical approval was obtained from the ethical committee of the hospital and Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Informed consent was obtained from the legal representatives of all participants included in the study.

The experimental procedure was run with 36 ASC/non-ASC dyads following a repeated-measure design with two conditions:  Full-body interaction MR environment and the typical social intervention strategy based on LEGO bricks. The children with ASC played with their non-ASC partner for 15 minutes in the MR system, and with the same partner for 15 minutes in the LEGO setup. All children participated in both experimental conditions, and the order was randomized for each pair to counterbalance any learning effects. There was a 5 min break followed by a relaxation training between the 2 conditions. As a result of the experimental trials, the ASCMEOR dataset has been generated. Each experimental trial has a trial no associated with it e.g., the first trial has the trial no: “0001”. The data from each trial is organized in the following format:

(0) Experiment Timeline

(1) Video-coding of overt behaviors;

(2) System log files detailing system triggering of events;

(3) Questionnaires to the children and to the parents;

(4)Psychophysiological measures, i.e. electrocardiogram (ECG), electrodermal activity (EDA) and accelerometer (ACC)