Superpower Glass: Delivering Unobtrusive Real-time Social Cues in Wearable Systems
This work addresses the challenge of delivering unobtrusive, real-time social cues to children with ASD to support their social interactions, building incrementally on previous in-lab trials.
The researchers developed a wearable system called Superpower Glass that provides real-time facial expression recognition and social cues via Google Glass, specifically designed as a behavioral aid for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). They evaluated the system through at-home trials with multiple children with ASD, integrating it with a mobile app for video review and therapy context.
We have developed a system for automatic facial expression recognition, which runs on Google Glass and delivers real-time social cues to the wearer. We evaluate the system as a behavioral aid for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), who can greatly benefit from real-time non-invasive emotional cues and are more sensitive to sensory input than neurotypically developing children. In addition, we present a mobile application that enables users of the wearable aid to review their videos along with auto-curated emotional information on the video playback bar. This integrates our learning aid into the context of behavioral therapy. Expanding on our previous work describing in-lab trials, this paper presents our system and application-level design decisions in depth as well as the interface learnings gathered during the use of the system by multiple children with ASD in an at-home iterative trial.