Screening Early Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder via Expressing Needs with Index Finger Pointing

It is evident that the prevalence of the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been in a worrying situation with an average rate of 1% around the world. However, existing clinical diagnostic methods for ASD and medical conditions are far from adequate for a wide range of early screening and diagnosis, especially in remote areas. In this paper, a detailed protocol aiming to describe the clinical task - Expressing Needs with Index Finger Pointing (ENIFP) is proposed and a multi-sensor vision system is developed to record and analyze the performance of the children. Mutual gaze and gesture are considered to be the main basis to judge the performance of the children. The improved SSD algorithm is applied to locate the hands and recognize gestures. Eight subjects including 5 typically developed adults and 3 children (2 ASD and 1 non-ASD) are invited to the experiment. The result shows that the system can check the mutual gaze and recognize the gesture - index finger pointing accurately and demonstrates the proposed system has the potential to assist screen ASD.