A Gamified Mobile System for Crowdsourcing Video for Autism Research

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a condition affecting 70 million children worldwide. Due to delays in diagnosis and imbalances in coverage, it is necessary to develop new methods of care delivery for use outside of clinical settings., We present a mobile charades-style game, Guess What?, used for acquisition of structured video from children with ASD for behavioral disease research. By analyzing facial affect in response to various prompts, we demonstrate that engagement and facial affect can be quantified and measured using real-time image processing algorithms: an important step for future therapies, diagnostics, and outcome measures based on home video. Our study of thirteen subjects reveals that game sessions displaying "faces" to the player produced the most emotive facial expressions in the player by a considerable margin. Videos from the younger neurotypical group contained 73.9% more frames with emotion in this category, compared to the older group with ASD. Moreover, results from all categories indicated 20.7% less facial engagement among older children with ASD compared to younger children with no diagnosis.