Emotional self-regulation of individuals with autism spectrum disorders: smartwatches for monitoring and interaction

In this paper, we analyze the needs of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to have a pervasive, feasible and non-stigmatizing form of assistance in their emotional self-regulation, in order to ease certain behavioral issues that undermine their mental health throughout their life. We ar...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Torrado Vidal, Juan Carlos, Gómez Escribano, Javier, Montoro Manrique, Germán
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2017
País:España
Institución:Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Repositorio:Biblos-e Archivo. Repositorio Institucional de la UAM
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.uam.es:10486/680595
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10486/680595
https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s17061359
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Wearable computing
assistive technologies
affective computing
behavioral monitoring
cognitive disabilities
mobile assistance
ubiquitous computing
Informática
Descripción
Sumario:In this paper, we analyze the needs of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to have a pervasive, feasible and non-stigmatizing form of assistance in their emotional self-regulation, in order to ease certain behavioral issues that undermine their mental health throughout their life. We argue the potential of recent widespread wearables, and more specifically smartwatches, to achieve this goal. Then, a smartwatch system that implements a wide range of self-regulation strategies and infers outburst patterns from physiological signals and movement is presented, along with an authoring tool for smartphones that is to be used by caregivers or family members to create and edit these strategies, in an adaptive way. We conducted an intensive experiment with two individuals with ASD who showed varied, representative behavioral responses to their emotional dysregulation. Both users were able to employ effective, customized emotional self-regulation strategies by means of the system, recovering from the majority of mild stress episodes and temper tantrums experienced in the nine days of experiment in their classroom