A Novel System Based on a Smart Toy Responding to Child’s Facial Expressions: Potential Use in Early Treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorders

We present the first working implementation of a novel technological system, potentially helpful in the early intervention of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), to reinforce some basic social competencies in children. The system, composed of several components, allows an interactive toy to produce rewarding outputs (as coloured lights and amusing sounds), in response to specific child’s facial expressions relevant for social interaction, like a smile or eye contact towards the therapist. The toy rewarding patterns could be used in future tests to improve the social engagement between an ASD child and the therapist. The system relies on a wearable camera, arranged on the therapist’s chest, which captures frontal images of the child during play activities, and sends them to a central computer; this unit extracts, through standard computer vision algorithms, relevant social information from the child’s face; finally, the information is sent to the interactive toy which accordingly produces rewarding outputs. The prototype was successfully tested in a lab environment. The real-time communication between the various components, all based on wireless technology, proved to be reliable for a field test, which is planned to be run in the next months in actual therapy sessions involving ASD children.