Psycho-Intelligent Dialogue Agents for Enhancing Emotional Self-Regulation in Autistic Teenagers

Abstract

Autistic adolescents often experience the inability to identify their emotions and self-regulate them, thus creating the impulse for the construction of intelligent assistive technologies. Building on this premise, this work proposes a novel Psycho-Intelligent Dialogue Agent (PIDA) system, which attempts to incorporate advances in affective computing, contextualized reasoning , and psychotherapeutic dialogues, in aiding emotional self-regulation with teenagers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This system integrates a visual emotion recognition model with an adaptive conversational bow. To train the emotion classifier for real time application trained using transfer learning techniques based on the VGG16 architecture of deep convolutional neural networks, it was trained on a specialized dataset comprising of autistic children's facial expressions and achieved an accuracy of 71% at a 5-emotion recognition task. The Effect recognition module serves the context-aware dialogue manager in real time adapting and personalizing the emotional regulation frameworks to be employed. PIDA's dialogues are based on the principles of clinical psychotherapy, with psychotherapeutic techniques and intervention strategies which are individually tuned to the emotional state and contextual parameters of the situation. The system was designed and built salted with caregiver integration features to enable guardians to monitor progress and active participant in the personalization of the intervention. Primary experimental results reflect the feasibility of this dimension in emotional awareness and emotional regulation and coping strategies. To support we provide uninterrupted emotional assistance to autistic young people and offer flexible support resources during and in between emotional therapy appointments