This Is The Google Glass That Helps Kids With Autism

Nick Haber, Catalin Voss, and Dennis Wall have upgraded Google Glass for children with autism. The final product, called Superpower Glass, provides behavioral therapy to children with autism in their homes. The six-year project has three main elements: face detection, emotion recognition, and in-app review. These main elements help autistic children learn as they interact with their environment, as the three proponents wrote on IEEE Spectrum:  

Our system provides behavioral therapy to the children in their homes, where social skills are first learned. It uses the glasses’ outward-facing camera to record the children’s interactions with family members; then our software detects the faces in those videos and interprets their expressions of emotion. Through an app, caregivers can review auto-curated videos of social interactions.
Over the years we’ve refined our prototype and run clinical trials to prove its beneficial effects: We’ve found that its use increases kids’ eye contact and social engagement and also improves their recognition of emotions. Our team at Stanford University has worked with coauthor Dennis Wall’s spinoff company, Cognoa, to earn a “breakthrough therapy” designation for Superpower Glass, which puts the technology on a fast track toward approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). We aim to get health insurance plans to cover the costs of the technology as an augmented-reality therapy.
The kids are motivated to seek out social interactions, they learn that faces are interesting, and they realize they can gather valuable information from the expressions on those faces. But the glasses are not meant to be a permanent prosthesis. The kids do 20-minute sessions a few times a week in their own homes, and the entire intervention currently lasts for six weeks. Children are expected to quickly learn how to detect the emotions of their social partners and then, after they’ve gained social confidence, stop using the glasses.
Our system is intended to ameliorate a serious problem: limited access to intensive behavioral therapy.

image via IEEE Spectrum


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