A scalable app for measuring autism risk behaviors in young children: A technical validity and feasibility study

Jordan Hashemi, Kathleen Campbell, Kimberly L.H. Carpenter, Adrianne Harris, Qiang Qiu, Mariano Tepper, Steven Espinosa, Jana Schaich Borg, Samuel Marsan, Robert Calderbank, Jeffery P. Baker, Helen L. Egger, Geraldine Dawson, Guillermo Sapiro

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

In spite of recent advances in the genetics and neuroscience of early childhood mental health, behavioral observation is still the gold standard in screening, diagnosis, and outcome assessment. Unfortunately, clinical observation is often sub-jective, needs significant rater training, does not capture data from participants in their natural environment, and is not scalable for use in large populations or for longitu-dinal monitoring. To address these challenges, we devel-oped and tested a self-contained app designed to measure toddlers' social communication behaviors in a primary care, school, or home setting. Twenty 16-30 month old children with and without autism participated in this study. Tod-dlers watched the developmentally-Appropriate visual stim-uli on an iPad in a pediatric clinic and in our lab while the iPad camera simultaneously recorded video of the child's behaviors. Automated computer vision algorithms coded emotions and social referencing to quantify autism risk be-haviors. We validated our automatic computer coding by comparing the computer-generated analysis of facial expres-sion and social referencing to human coding of these behav-iors. We report our method and propose the development and testing of measures of young children's behaviors as the first step toward development of a novel, fully integrated, low-cost, scalable screening tool for autism and other neu-rodevelopmental disorders of early childhood.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationMOBIHEALTH 2015 - 5th EAI International Conference on Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare - Transforming Healthcare through Innovations in Mobile and Wireless Technologies
EditorsAkram Alomainy, Yang Hao, William Whittow, Konstantina S. Nikita, Clive G. Parini
PublisherICST
ISBN (Electronic)9781631900884
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 22 2015
Externally publishedYes
Event5th EAI International Conference on Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare - Transforming Healthcare through Innovations in Mobile and Wireless Technologies, MOBIHEALTH 2015 - London, United Kingdom
Duration: Oct 14 2015Oct 16 2015

Publication series

NameMOBIHEALTH 2015 - 5th EAI International Conference on Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare - Transforming Healthcare through Innovations in Mobile and Wireless Technologies

Conference

Conference5th EAI International Conference on Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare - Transforming Healthcare through Innovations in Mobile and Wireless Technologies, MOBIHEALTH 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityLondon
Period10/14/1510/16/15

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Health Informatics

Keywords

  • Autism
  • Automatic behavioral coding
  • Facial affect coding system
  • Integrated app
  • Natural environments.
  • Scalability

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