TY - JOUR
T1 - Human–Robot Gesture Analysis for Objective Assessment of Autism Spectrum Disorder
AU - Wijayasinghe, Indika B.
AU - Ranatunga, Isura
AU - Balakrishnan, Namrata
AU - Bugnariu, Nicoleta
AU - Popa, Dan O.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the TxMRC consortium grant: Human–Robot Interaction System for Early Diagnosis and Treatment of Childhood Autism Spectrum Disorders (RoDiCA) and by the US National Science Foundation Grant CPS 1035913. The authors wish to thank David Hanson, Richard Margolin, Matt Stevenson and Joshua Jach of RoboKind for their help with Zeno R-30. The authors thank Robert Longnecker, Janet Trammell, David Cummings and Carolyn Carr from UNTHSC for their help with the experimental data collection presented in this paper. Thanks also go to Carolyn Garver of Dallas Autism Treatment Center for the help provided with subject recruitment. The authors also thank Abhishek Thakurdesai from the NGS group for help with Zeno programming.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
PY - 2016/11/1
Y1 - 2016/11/1
N2 - In this paper we study the use of human robot interaction as a mean to objectively evaluate imitation deficits in children with autism. Robot control and data analysis methods were combined to assess the quality of interaction between the robot and the subjects. Humanoid robot Zeno was used to execute upper body gestures which the subjects were asked to imitate. The resulting motion of the subject was acquired through a motion capture system and compared with the intended motion performed by Zeno using the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm. During this study, the clinical hypothesis was that the resulting DTW cost can serve as a quantitative measure for the similarity between the motions, and thus can be used to objectively assess the severity of imitation deficits exhibited by the child. To validate this hypothesis, we present two sets of experiments, one with a set of healthy adults and the other with a group of children, some with autism spectrum disorder. The experiment with adult subjects serves as a statistically significant test to demonstrate the viability of the DTW cost as a similarity measure for the gesture analysis, whereas the experiment with child subjects is a pilot study to differentiate imitation performance for children with autism.
AB - In this paper we study the use of human robot interaction as a mean to objectively evaluate imitation deficits in children with autism. Robot control and data analysis methods were combined to assess the quality of interaction between the robot and the subjects. Humanoid robot Zeno was used to execute upper body gestures which the subjects were asked to imitate. The resulting motion of the subject was acquired through a motion capture system and compared with the intended motion performed by Zeno using the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm. During this study, the clinical hypothesis was that the resulting DTW cost can serve as a quantitative measure for the similarity between the motions, and thus can be used to objectively assess the severity of imitation deficits exhibited by the child. To validate this hypothesis, we present two sets of experiments, one with a set of healthy adults and the other with a group of children, some with autism spectrum disorder. The experiment with adult subjects serves as a statistically significant test to demonstrate the viability of the DTW cost as a similarity measure for the gesture analysis, whereas the experiment with child subjects is a pilot study to differentiate imitation performance for children with autism.
KW - Childhood autism
KW - Dynamic time warping
KW - Gesture analysis
KW - Human–robot interaction
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84997207002&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s12369-016-0379-2
DO - 10.1007/s12369-016-0379-2
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84997207002
SN - 1875-4791
VL - 8
SP - 695
EP - 707
JO - International Journal of Social Robotics
JF - International Journal of Social Robotics
IS - 5
ER -