Measuring K-degree facial interaction between robot and children with autism spectrum disorders

This paper presents the design, implementation, and application of a vision-based automatic system that measures facial interaction based on human's cognitive feature. We investigated the feature of people's facial interaction under natural gaze-movement via an experiment, and created criteria of k-degree facial interaction and face-to-face interaction depending only on facial orientation. These criteria were used to develop the automatic system. The system is vision-based. It could be easily embedded into applications. We focused on an application to understand the behavior of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and tested the use of the automatic system in a robot-assisted activity for those children. The results suggested that the system could help to improve the efficiency of behavior analysis during the children's activities with the robot. The facial interaction measured between the children and the robot can be used by therapists to comprehend the children's psychological aspects and state of health.