TY - GEN
T1 - Comparing the gaze responses of children with autism and typically developed individuals in human-robot interaction
AU - Mavadati, S. Mohammad
AU - Feng, Huanghao
AU - Gutierrez, Anibal
AU - Mahoor, Mohammad H.
PY - 2015/2/12
Y1 - 2015/2/12
N2 - Robots are becoming a part of humans' social life as assistants, companionbots, therapists, and entertainers. One promising application of the socially assistive robots is in autism therapy, where robots are employed to enhance verbal and nonverbal skills (e.g. eye-gaze attention, facial expression mimicry) of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). One important question is 'How the gaze responses of individuals with ASD differ from that of Typically Developing (TD) peers when interacting with a robot?' We present the results of our recent studies for modeling and analyzing the gaze pattern of children with ASD when they interact with a robot called NAO. This paper reports the differences of gaze responses of TD and ASD group in two conversational contexts: Speaking versus Listening. We used Variable-order Markov Model (VMM) to discover the temporal gaze directional patterns of ASD and TD groups. The results reveal that the gaze responses of the TD individuals in speaking and listening contexts, can be best modeled by VMM with order zero and three, respectively. As we expected, the result show that the temporal gaze patterns of typically developed children are varying when the role in the conversational context is changed. However for the ASD individuals for both conversational contexts the VMM with order one could best fit the data. Overall, the results conclude that VMM is a powerful technique to model different gaze responses of TD and ASD individuals in speaking and listening contexts.
AB - Robots are becoming a part of humans' social life as assistants, companionbots, therapists, and entertainers. One promising application of the socially assistive robots is in autism therapy, where robots are employed to enhance verbal and nonverbal skills (e.g. eye-gaze attention, facial expression mimicry) of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). One important question is 'How the gaze responses of individuals with ASD differ from that of Typically Developing (TD) peers when interacting with a robot?' We present the results of our recent studies for modeling and analyzing the gaze pattern of children with ASD when they interact with a robot called NAO. This paper reports the differences of gaze responses of TD and ASD group in two conversational contexts: Speaking versus Listening. We used Variable-order Markov Model (VMM) to discover the temporal gaze directional patterns of ASD and TD groups. The results reveal that the gaze responses of the TD individuals in speaking and listening contexts, can be best modeled by VMM with order zero and three, respectively. As we expected, the result show that the temporal gaze patterns of typically developed children are varying when the role in the conversational context is changed. However for the ASD individuals for both conversational contexts the VMM with order one could best fit the data. Overall, the results conclude that VMM is a powerful technique to model different gaze responses of TD and ASD individuals in speaking and listening contexts.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84945186772&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84945186772&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/HUMANOIDS.2014.7041510
DO - 10.1109/HUMANOIDS.2014.7041510
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84945186772
T3 - IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots
SP - 1128
EP - 1133
BT - 2014 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Humanoids 2014
PB - IEEE Computer Society
T2 - 2014 14th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Humanoids 2014
Y2 - 18 November 2014 through 20 November 2014
ER -