A Review of “Music and Movement” Therapies for Children with Autism: Embodied Interventions for Multisystem Development

The rising incidence of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) has led to a surge in the number of children needing autism interventions. This paper is a call to clinicians to diversify autism interventions and to promote the use of embodied music-based approaches to facilitate multisystem development. Approximately 12% of all autism interventions and 45% of all alternative treatment strategies in schools involve music-based activities. Musical training impacts various forms of development including communication, social-emotional, and motor development in children with ASDs and other developmental disorders as well as typically developing children. In this review, we will highlight the multisystem impairments of ASDs, explain why music and movement therapies are a powerful clinical tool, as well as describe mechanisms and offer evidence in support of music therapies for children with ASDs. We will support our claims by reviewing results from brain imaging studies reporting on music therapy effects in children with autism. We will also discuss the critical elements and the different types of music therapy approaches commonly used in pediatric neurological populations including autism. We provide strong arguments for the use of music and movement interventions as a multisystem treatment tool for children with ASDs. Finally, we also make recommendations for assessment and treatment of children with ASDs, and provide directions for future research

Dyadic Movement Synchrony Estimation Under Privacy-preserving Conditions

Movement synchrony refers to the dynamic temporal connection between the motions of interacting people. The applications of movement synchrony are wide and broad. For example, as a measure of coordination between teammates, synchrony scores are often reported in sports. The autism community also identifies movement synchrony as a key indicator of children's social and developmental achievements. In general, raw video recordings are often used for movement synchrony estimation, with the drawback that they may reveal people's identities. Furthermore, such privacy concern also hinders data sharing, one major roadblock to a fair comparison between different approaches in autism research. To address the issue, this paper proposes an ensemble method for movement synchrony estimation, one of the first deep-learning-based methods for automatic movement synchrony assessment under privacy-preserving conditions. Our method relies entirely on publicly shareable, identity-agnostic secondary data, such as skeleton data and optical flow. We validate our method on two datasets: (1) PT13 dataset collected from autism therapy interventions and (2) TASD-2 dataset collected from synchronized diving competitions. In this context, our method outperforms its counterpart approaches, both deep neural networks and alternatives.Comment: IEEE ICPR 2022. 8 pages, 3 figure

Pose Uncertainty Aware Movement Synchrony Estimation via Spatial-Temporal Graph Transformer

Movement synchrony reflects the coordination of body movements between interacting dyads. The estimation of movement synchrony has been automated by powerful deep learning models such as transformer networks. However, instead of designing a specialized network for movement synchrony estimation, previous transformer-based works broadly adopted architectures from other tasks such as human activity recognition. Therefore, this paper proposed a skeleton-based graph transformer for movement synchrony estimation. The proposed model applied ST-GCN, a spatial-temporal graph convolutional neural network for skeleton feature extraction, followed by a spatial transformer for spatial feature generation. The spatial transformer is guided by a uniquely designed joint position embedding shared between the same joints of interacting individuals. Besides, we incorporated a temporal similarity matrix in temporal attention computation considering the periodic intrinsic of body movements. In addition, the confidence score associated with each joint reflects the uncertainty of a pose, while previous works on movement synchrony estimation have not sufficiently emphasized this point. Since transformer networks demand a significant amount of data to train, we constructed a dataset for movement synchrony estimation using Human3.6M, a benchmark dataset for human activity recognition, and pretrained our model on it using contrastive learning. We further applied knowledge distillation to alleviate information loss introduced by pose detector failure in a privacy-preserving way. We compared our method with representative approaches on PT13, a dataset collected from autism therapy interventions. Our method achieved an overall accuracy of 88.98% and surpassed its counterparts by a wide margin while maintaining data privacy.Comment: Accepted by 24th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI'22). 17 pages, 2 figure

Auditory Measures of Attention & Working Memory in Children with Learning Disability & Typically Developing Children

Learning disability is a general term that describes specific kinds of learning problems. Children with learning disability have deficits in selective attention and working memory. It is believed that difficulties in working memory will influence the ability to attend to a task. The present study was done to investigate and compare the performances of children with learning disability and typically developing children in tasks evaluating auditory aspects of selective attention, divided attention and working memory capacity. 19 children with age range 10 to 14 years participated in the study. Typically developing children group consisted of 10 participants. Learning disability group consisted of 9 children. Dichotic Listening test, auditory stroop task and Digit Backward Recall task were the tests used for assessment of selective attention, divided attention and working memory capacity. Repeated measures of ANOVA was performed to investigate the effects of group (learning disability group and typically developing children group) and ear (Directed Right, directed left and free listening) in dichotic listening task. The test result showed significant main effect of group and ear as well as children in both the groups performed best for directed right condition of directed left task followed by free listening and directed left condition. Independent ‘t’ test results  revealed that there was a significant differences in stroop reaction time, digit backward recall and stroop score.  In conclusion typically developing children performed better than that of children with learning disability in both tasks. Keywords: learning disability, typically, childre

A COMPARITIVE EVALUATION OF SPECIES OF GUDUCHI (TINOSPORA CORDIFOLIA (WILID.) MEIRS EX HOOK. F & THOMS., TINOSPORA MALABARICA MEIRS EX HOOK, TINOSPORA CRISPA MEIRS.) W.R.T SATWA

Background: Guduchi is a plant belonging to Menispermaceae family and widely used in Ayurvedic system of medicine. Tinospora cordifolia is the accepted botanical source of Guduchi. All the three species are indigenous to the tropical areas of India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Guduchi Satwa is the most commonly used dosage form of the plant for various conditions like fever, arthritis, gastric ulcer cough etc. Tinospora cordifolia (Guduchi) is a widely used shrub in folk and Ayurvedic systems of medicine. Species of the plant, stem size, collection time, season and maturity of the plant may affect the yield and physico-chemical profile of Guduchi Satwa. Due to high demand and less yield of Satwa from Guduchi plant, market sample of Guduchi Satwa is subjected to adulteration. Hence this study is aimed at standardizing Guduchi Satwa prepared from all the three available species of the plant. Methodology: The study deals with preparation of Satwa as per the classical text of Ayurveda, identifying organoleptic features, conducting physicochemical and photochemical screening of the Satwa of all the above mentioned species of Guduchi (Tinospora cordifolia (wilid.) Meirs ex hook. f & thoms., Tinospora malabarica meirs ex hook, Tinospora crispa meirs.). Results: The study provided significant difference in the yield of Satwa. Variations in the organoleptic characters were insignificant. All the phytoconstituents were found to be same and the physicochemical values were within the limits in all three species

Analgesic Activity of Sebastiania chamaelea (L.) Muell. Arg.

Background: This study intended to experimentally evaluate the analgesic activity of Sebastiania chamaelea (L.) Muell. Arg. which is widely used by folklore and traditional healers in pain relief. The drug is commonly known as ‘Bhumi Eranda’ among the locals.Methods: The plant material of Sebastiania chamaelea (L.) Muell. Arg. was collected from the fields of Sri Sri College of Ayurvedic Science and Research, Bangalore and preserved as per the standard method. The toxicity studies carried out earlier has proved that, the drug was non-toxic up to 3000 mg/kg body weight. The effective doses were derived as 300 mg/kg (lower) and 600 mg/kg (higher) body weight and the experimental study was conducted. Analgesic screening models used for the study are – Eddy’s Hot plate and Tail immersion models. The study was carried out in 4 groups i.e. Control, Standard, Lower dose Kashaya of Sebastiania chamaelea (L.) Muell. Arg. and Higher dose Kashaya of Sebastiania chamaelea (L.) Muell. Arg. in each model. The activity was compared with a standard reference drug, Tramadol and Diclofenac.Results: The results were analyzed by using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) test followed by Dunnett test to detect the significance of differences between each group and control.Conclusion: The study helped to conclude, Sebastiania chamaelea (L.) Muell. Arg. as an ideal analgesic and supported the traditional claim

Social Visual Behavior Analytics for Autism Therapy of Children Based on Automated Mutual Gaze Detection

Social visual behavior, as a type of non-verbal communication, plays a central role in studying social cognitive processes in interactive and complex settings of autism therapy interventions. However, for social visual behavior analytics in children with autism, it is challenging to collect gaze data manually and evaluate them because it costs a lot of time and effort for human coders. In this paper, we introduce a social visual behavior analytics approach by quantifying the mutual gaze performance of children receiving play-based autism interventions using an automated mutual gaze detection framework. Our analysis is based on a video dataset that captures and records social interactions between children with autism and their therapy trainers (N=28 observations, 84 video clips, 21 Hrs duration). The effectiveness of our framework was evaluated by comparing the mutual gaze ratio derived from the mutual gaze detection framework with the human-coded ratio values. We analyzed the mutual gaze frequency and duration across different therapy settings, activities, and sessions. We created mutual gaze-related measures for social visual behavior score prediction using multiple machine learning-based regression models. The results show that our method provides mutual gaze measures that reliably represent (or even replace) the human coders' hand-coded social gaze measures and effectively evaluates and predicts ASD children's social visual performance during the intervention. Our findings have implications for social interaction analysis in small-group behavior assessments in numerous co-located settings in (special) education and in the workplace.Comment: Accepted to IEEE/ACM international conference on Connected Health: Applications, Systems and Engineering Technologies (CHASE) 202

Estimation of salivary glycoconjugates and salivary ros levels in chronic periodontitis: a clinico-biochemical study

Background: Periodontitis is a chronic inflammatory disease of periodontal tissue, characterized by persistent inflammation of the connective tissue and alveolar bone destruction. Patients with periodontal disease show the differences in the composition of saliva. Newer diagnostic tools based on analysis of body fluids such as saliva, GCF and serum are found to be useful for diagnosis as well as monitoring the disease activity. Thus, aim of the study was to estimate the concentration of salivary glycoconjugates (sialic acid, total protein) and salivary ROS in unstimulated whole saliva of subjects with chronic periodontitis and to compare the concentration with healthy/gingivitis subjects.Methods: The study sample consisted of 60 subjects (33 males and 27 females) with age ranging from 30-60 years. A detailed case history was taken from all the subjects and periodontal disease parameters (bleeding on probing, probing pocket depth and clinical attachment levels) were recorded at baseline and subjects were divided into 2 groups. Group I- control group (healthy/gingivitis subjects) and Group II -test group (chronic periodontitis). Saliva samples were collected from the subjects and stored at -700 ºC.  Periodate Resorcinol Assay was done to estimate the levels of sialic acid, Biuret test was done to assess the levels of total protein and  d-ROMs test was done to assess the level of ROS. Statistical analysis was done using students unpaired ‘t’ test and Pearsons correlation test. Results: It was found that the levels of salivary glycoconjugates and ROS are increased in subjects with chronic periodontitis when compared to healthy/gingivitis subjects. Thus it can reflect the clinical status of gingival and periodontal tissues.Conclusions: Estimation of the levels of glycoconjugates and ROS may be used as one of the reliable biomarkers to assess the severity of periodontal disease and to monitor the disease progression

Role of RAS signaling in ovarian cancer

The RAS family of proteins is among the most frequently mutated genes in human malignancies. In ovarian cancer (OC), the most lethal gynecological malignancy, RAS, especially KRAS mutational status at codons 12, 13, and 61, ranges from 6-65% spanning different histo-types. Normally RAS regulates several signaling pathways involved in a myriad of cellular signaling cascades mediating numerous cellular processes like cell proliferation, differentiation, invasion, and death. Aberrant activation of RAS leads to uncontrolled induction of several downstream signaling pathways such as RAF-1/MAPK (mitogen-activated protein kinase), PI3K phosphoinositide-3 kinase (PI3K)/AKT, RalGEFs, Rac/Rho, BRAF (v-Raf murine sarcoma viral oncogene homolog B), MEK1 (mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase 1), ERK (extracellular signal-regulated kinase), PKB (protein kinase B) and PKC (protein kinase C) involved in cell proliferation as well as maintenance pathways thereby driving tumorigenesis and cancer cell propagation. KRAS mutation is also known to be a biomarker for poor outcome and chemoresistance in OC. As a malignancy with several histotypes showing varying histopathological characteristics, we focus on reviewing recent literature showcasing the involvement of oncogenic RAS in mediating carcinogenesis and chemoresistance in OC and its subtypes