A smart glasses app may help children with autism to focus on and interact with other people by overlaying bullseye targets and cartoons on their faces. The idea is that this will make interactions more entertaining, so that someone wearing the glasses will get the necessary encouragement to hone their social skills.
People with autism can struggle socially because they often find it hard to interpret facial expressions. One-third of autistic people also have symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), meaning they can quickly tire of social interactions.
Now at US tech company Brain Power has developed an app called Empowered Brain. It runs on Google Glass – smart glasses that overlay extra information in front of the wearer to augment their view. When Empowered Brain detects human faces, it superimposes bullseye targets and cartoon faces over them to attract the wearer’s gaze.
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Stars, points and messages of encouragement pop up on the display to reward people for focusing on faces and making eye contact. Correctly identifying expressions like happy or sad by tilting the head left or right wins extra points. “We try to make the experience as fun and engaging as possible,” says Sahin.
Building confidence
Eight people with both autism and ADHD aged 11 to 20 have recently tried the app. Each wore the glasses for between 10 and 20 minutes while they completed a series of games with the parent who sat opposite them.
Two days after the training session, the participants were 61 per cent less hyperactive on average, according to questionnaires filled out by their parents. Increasing their motivation to engage in social contact may have made them less restless, says Sahin. “Every micro-success in the game builds confidence and makes you want to keep trying,” he says.
The findings match the results of a pilot study in which a 13-year-old boy with autism completed 16 training sessions with the glasses. His mother and three teachers judged that he showed significant improvements in .
Placebo effect?
The approach has potential, but the preliminary results should be interpreted with caution, says at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The pilot studies were small and didn’t control for the placebo effect, he says. “We know that there is a strong placebo effect in autism interventions, particularly when the outcome measure is based on a caregiver report,” he says.
It is also unclear what the longer-term effects of the glasses might be. “Two dangers are that the technology could become a distraction, drawing the participant’s attention away from human social cues, or become an end unto itself, teaching skills in interacting with technology that don’t generalise to interactions with people,” says Rehg.
Sahin’s team is planning a larger, placebo-controlled trial to untangle some of these issues.
The smart glasses join other technologies that are being developed for people with autism, like social robots and brain-computer interface games, says Rehg. “We are still in the early stages, but all of these technologies are well worth the effort, given their potential to provide more scalable access to care,” he says.
JMIR Mental Health
Read more: How Minecraft is helping children with autism make new friends
