A hybrid solution for monitoring conversational skills of children with special needs

Children/Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) demonstrate communication skill deficits and often do not utilize appropriate turn-taking in conversations. Several intervention strategies have been designed to improve conversational skills, but assessing conversations and determining strategy effectiveness often prove to be complicated and time-consuming processes. In this paper, we present: (i) a lightweight smartphone-based conversational turn monitoring system which automatically measures turn-taking statistics of speakers involved in a conversation (thus significantly reducing the labor involved in determining intervention success); (ii) evaluations of the effectiveness of our proposed monitoring system using several collected conversational traces; (iii) a customizable Android application developed to teach students how to conduct conversations; and (iv) preliminary evaluations of the effectiveness of the Android application in improving the communication skills of adolescents with ASD/speech/language deficits using two unique communication skill rubrics designed by our speech therapist. Our preliminary evaluations show promising results of our proposed low-cost hybrid monitoring solution for tracking the conversational skills of students with communication skill deficits.