Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Mar 21, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 25, 2019 - May 6, 2019
Date Accepted: Feb 9, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Toward Continuous Social Phenotyping: Analyzing Gaze Patterns in an Emotion Recognition Task for Children With Autism Through Wearable Smart Glasses
Background:
Several studies have shown that facial attention differs in children with autism. Measuring eye gaze and emotion recognition in children with autism is challenging, as standard clinical assessments must be delivered in clinical settings by a trained clinician. Wearable technologies may be able to bring eye gaze and emotion recognition into natural social interactions and settings.
Objective:
This study aimed to test: (1) the feasibility of tracking gaze using wearable smart glasses during a facial expression recognition task and (2) the ability of these gaze-tracking data, together with facial expression recognition responses, to distinguish children with autism from neurotypical controls (NCs).
Methods:
We compared the eye gaze and emotion recognition patterns of 16 children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 17 children without ASD via wearable smart glasses fitted with a custom eye tracker. Children identified static facial expressions of images presented on a computer screen along with nonsocial distractors while wearing Google Glass and the eye tracker. Faces were presented in three trials, during one of which children received feedback in the form of the correct classification. We employed hybrid human-labeling and computer vision–enabled methods for pupil tracking and world–gaze translation calibration. We analyzed the impact of gaze and emotion recognition features in a prediction task aiming to distinguish children with ASD from NC participants.
Results:
Gaze and emotion recognition patterns enabled the training of a classifier that distinguished ASD and NC groups. However, it was unable to significantly outperform other classifiers that used only age and gender features, suggesting that further work is necessary to disentangle these effects.
Conclusions:
Although wearable smart glasses show promise in identifying subtle differences in gaze tracking and emotion recognition patterns in children with and without ASD, the present form factor and data do not allow for these differences to be reliably exploited by machine learning systems. Resolving these challenges will be an important step toward continuous tracking of the ASD phenotype.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.