GOLIAH (Gaming Open Library for Intervention in Autism at Home): a 6-month single blind matched controlled exploratory study

BackgroundTo meet the required hours of intensive intervention for treating children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), we developed an automated serious gaming platform (11 games) to deliver intervention at home (GOLIAH) by mapping the imitation and joint attention (JA) subset of age-adapted stimuli from the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM) intervention. Here, we report the results of a 6-month matched controlled exploratory study.MethodsFrom two specialized clinics, we included 14 children (age range 5–8 years) with ASD and 10 controls matched for gender, age, sites, and treatment as usual (TAU). Participants from the experimental group received in addition to TAU four 30-min sessions with GOLIAH per week at home and one at hospital for 6 months. Statistics were performed using Linear Mixed Models.ResultsChildren and parents participated in 40% of the planned sessions. They were able to use the 11 games, and participants trained with GOLIAH improved time to perform the task in most JA games and imitation scores in most imitation games. GOLIAH intervention did not affect Parental Stress Index scores. At end-point, we found in both groups a significant improvement for Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule scores, Vineland socialization score, Parental Stress Index total score, and Child Behavior Checklist internalizing, externalizing and total problems. However, we found no significant change for by time × group interaction.ConclusionsDespite the lack of superiority of TAU + GOLIAH versus TAU, the results are interesting both in terms of changes by using the gaming platform and lack of parental stress increase. A large randomized controlled trial with younger participants (who are the core target of ESDM model) is now discussed. This should be facilitated by computing GOLIAH for a web platform.Trial registration Clinicaltrials.gov NCT0256041

An Integrated Approach for the Monitoring of Brain and Autonomic Response of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders during Treatment by Wearable Technologies

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are associated with physiological abnormalities, which are likely to contribute to the core symptoms of the condition. Wearable technologies can provide data in a semi-naturalistic setting, overcoming the limitations given by the constrained situations in which physiological signals are usually acquired. In this study an integrated system based on wearable technologies for the acquisition and analysis of neurophysiological and autonomic parameters during treatment is proposed and an application on five children with ASD is presented. Signals were acquired during a therapeutic session based on an imitation protocol in ASD children. Data were analyzed with the aim of extracting quantitative EEG (QEEG) features from EEG signals as well as heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) from ECG. The system allowed evidencing changes in neurophysiological and autonomic response from the state of disengagement to the state of engagement of the children, evidencing a cognitive involvement in the children in the tasks proposed. The high grade of acceptability of the monitoring platform is promising for further development and implementation of the tool. In particular if the results of this feasibility study would be confirmed in a larger sample of subjects, the system proposed could be adopted in more naturalistic paradigms that allow real world stimuli to be incorporated into EEG/psychophysiological studies for the monitoring of the effect of the treatment and for the implementation of more individualized therapeutic programs

Evaluating the Engagement with Social Robots

International audienceTo interact and cooperate with humans in their daily-life activities, robots should exhibit human-like " intelligence ". This skill will substantially emerge from the interconnection of all the algorithms used to ensure cognitive and interaction capabilities. While new robotics technologies allow us to extend such abilities, their evaluation for social interaction is still challenging. The quality of a human-robot interaction can not be reduced to the evaluation of the employed algorithms: we should integrate the engagement information that naturally arises during interaction in response to the robot's behaviors. In this paper we want to show a practical approach to evaluate the engagement aroused during interactions between humans and social robots. We will introduce a set of metrics useful in direct, face to face scenarios, based on the behaviors analysis of the human partners. We will show how such metrics are useS. M. Anzalone · M. Chetouani Sorbonne Universités , ful to assess how the robot is perceived by humans and how this perception changes according to the behaviors shown by the social robot. We discuss experimental results obtained in two human-interaction studies, with the robots Nao and iCub respectively

Hommage : décès de Bernard VALADAS

La disparition de Bernard Valadas le 26 avril 2010 a plongé la géomorphologie française dans une grande tristesse. C’était un personnage d’une grande modestie qui a su tenir une place centrale dans notre discipline. La qualité de ses travaux, son ouverture scientifique comme l’originalité de sa démarche lui ont conféré un rôle de passeur de frontière et d’animateur scientifique. Les travaux de Bernard Valadas expriment parfaitement les transformations des problématiques qu’a connu la géomorph..

A Multimodal People Recognition System for an Intelligent Environment

In this paper, a multimodal system for recognizing people in intelligent environments is presented. Users are identified and tracked by detecting and recognizing voices and faces through cameras and microphones spread around the environment. This multimodal approach has been chosen to develop a flexible and cheap though reliable system, implemented through consumer electronics. Voice features are extracted through a short time spectrum analysis, while face features are extracted using the eigenfaces technique. The recognition task is achieved through the use of some Support Vector Machines, one per modality, that learn and classify the features of each person, while bindings between modalities are also learnt through a cross-anchoring learning rule based on the mutual exclusivity selection principle. The system has been developed using NMM, a middleware software capable of splitting the sensors processing in several software nodes, making the system scalable in the number of cameras and microphones

Perception and human interaction for developmental learning of objects and affordances

Abstract — In this paper we describe a cognitive architecture for humanoids interacting with objects and caregivers in a developmental robotics scenario. The architecture is foundational to the MACSi project: it is designed to support experiments to make a humanoid robot gradually enlarge its repertoire of known objects and skills combining autonomous learning, social guidance and intrinsic motivation. This complex learning process requires the capability to learn affordances first. Here, we present the general framework for achieving these goals, focusing on the elementary action, perception and interaction modules. Preliminary experiments performed on the humanoid robot iCub are also discussed. I

Acquisition of handwriting in children with and without dysgraphia: A computational approach

International audienc

Behavioral Own-Body-Transformations in Children and Adolescents With Typical Development, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and Developmental Coordination Disorder

Background: In motor imitation, taking a partner's perspective often involves a mental body transformation from an embodied, ego-centered viewpoint to a disembodied, hetero-centered viewpoint. Impairments of both own-body-transformation (OBT) and abnormalities in visual-spatial processing have been reported in patients with neurodevelopmental disorders including autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In the context of a visual-motor interactive task, studying OBT impairments while disentangling the contribution of visual-spatial impairments associated with motor coordination problems has not been investigated.Methods: 85 children and adolescents (39 controls with typical development, TD; 29 patients with ASD; 17 patients with developmental coordination disorder, DCD), aged 6–19 years, participated in a behavioral paradigm in which participants interacted with a virtual tightrope walker (TW) standing and moving with him. The protocol enables to distinguish ego-centered and hetero-centered perspectives.Results: We show that (1) OBT was possible but difficult for children with neurodevelopmental disorders, as well as for TD children, when the task required the participant to perform a mental rotation in order to adopt a hetero-centered perspective. (2) Using multivariate models, hetero-centered perspective score was significantly associated with age, TW orientation, latency, and diagnosis. ASD and TD groups' performances were close and significantly correlated with age. However, it was not the case for DCD, since this group was specifically handicapped by visual-spatial impairments. (3) ASD and DCD did not perform similarly: motor performance as shown by movement amplitude was better in DCD than ASD. ASD motor response was more ambiguous and hardly readable.Conclusion: Changing perspective in a spatial environment is possible for patients with ASD although delayed compared with TD children. In patients with DCD, their visual-spatial impairments negatively modulated their performances in the experiment

Presentation_1_Behavioral Own-Body-Transformations in Children and Adolescents With Typical Development, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and Developmental Coordination Disorder.pdf

<p>Background: In motor imitation, taking a partner's perspective often involves a mental body transformation from an embodied, ego-centered viewpoint to a disembodied, hetero-centered viewpoint. Impairments of both own-body-transformation (OBT) and abnormalities in visual-spatial processing have been reported in patients with neurodevelopmental disorders including autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In the context of a visual-motor interactive task, studying OBT impairments while disentangling the contribution of visual-spatial impairments associated with motor coordination problems has not been investigated.</p><p>Methods: 85 children and adolescents (39 controls with typical development, TD; 29 patients with ASD; 17 patients with developmental coordination disorder, DCD), aged 6–19 years, participated in a behavioral paradigm in which participants interacted with a virtual tightrope walker (TW) standing and moving with him. The protocol enables to distinguish ego-centered and hetero-centered perspectives.</p><p>Results: We show that (1) OBT was possible but difficult for children with neurodevelopmental disorders, as well as for TD children, when the task required the participant to perform a mental rotation in order to adopt a hetero-centered perspective. (2) Using multivariate models, hetero-centered perspective score was significantly associated with age, TW orientation, latency, and diagnosis. ASD and TD groups' performances were close and significantly correlated with age. However, it was not the case for DCD, since this group was specifically handicapped by visual-spatial impairments. (3) ASD and DCD did not perform similarly: motor performance as shown by movement amplitude was better in DCD than ASD. ASD motor response was more ambiguous and hardly readable.</p><p>Conclusion: Changing perspective in a spatial environment is possible for patients with ASD although delayed compared with TD children. In patients with DCD, their visual-spatial impairments negatively modulated their performances in the experiment.</p