Any parent of young children will tell you that, no matter what you do, they are going to fall down and they are going to get hurt. After all, no parent can watch their child every second. But not all childhood pain comes from skinned knees and spreading rashes. It can come from fear of changing routines, lack of social interaction, or a lowered response to loud noises. These seemingly mundane behaviors that happen while parents are packing a lunch box can signal the developmental disorder Autism and, without a fresh set of eyes, many parents miss the early warning signs through no fault of their own.
Researchers from the National Science Foundation felt it was high time they gave parents a helping hand not only in diagnosing Autism but with tools that can help them identify and understand future behaviors. NSF created a five-year, $10 million research consortium aimed at creating evaluation and observational tools for diagnosing or treating behavioral disorders. This week, two Carnegie Mellon Universityresearchers, Associate Professor of Human Computer Interaction Anind Dey and professor of Robotics and Computer Science Takeo Kanade, joined NSF’s consortium, along with a who’s who of academic research teams from around the country, including USC, MIT, Georgia Institute of Technology and Boston University. The tools these experts hope to create will range from toys with cameras in them to hidden visual and microphone equipment, all in the name of better understanding. Because you don’t have to watch every minute if you know what to look for.
“If your child has a particular autistic disorder, they may have these repetitive motions that they make. And you go to a doctor and they ask how often your child is doing that. It could be happening all the time but you don’t have an objective way of measuring these behaviors,” says Associate Professor of Human Computer Interaction Anind Dey. “Your child’s teacher or doctor or therapist is likely asking questions that, unfortunately, most parents don’t know the answer to so if we can provide objective measures of these behaviors, that is useful.”
Beyond knowing what to look for, this raw, behavioral data has to be presented in a useful way so that it is useful for your child’s doctor, teacher or therapist. That’s where CMU’s Dey and Robotics professor Takeo Kanade come in. Their team is developing observational equipment and software to help parents better keep track of these behavioral instances so that the findings are easily viewed and understood by all parties. Dey hopes these tools will one day help parents keep an eye on their kids when it matters most.
“Autism isn’t diagnosed until a child is a couple of years old but if you know what signs to look for, you can diagnose it at 6 months old or earlier,” says Dey. “This has the potential to be an overwhelming amount of data so our goal is to appropriately present this data so that they can understand it and know what to do with it.”
Source: Anind Dey, Carnegie Mellon University
Writer: John Steele