A Mobile Communicator with Meta Communicator for Children with Asperger Syndrome

Transcription

1 A Mobile Communicator with Meta Communicator for Children with Asperger Syndrome B. T. Lau Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak School of Engineering, Computing and Science T.K. Low Universiti Malaysia Sarawak Faculty of Engineering Abstract. Our research aims to aid children with Asperger Syndrome in communication by information technology. We proposed an interactive prototype to assist children to communicate with people at school, home or care centre. Our main concern is to have the design that is affordable and portable. Our prototype emphasizes on localization of contents, it allows each user to create and import the self related and familiar images to his profile. Our communication assistant could also assist adults who have speech disability after stroke or other traumatic brain injury. I. INTRODUCTION Communication is a central aspect of our daily lives. Our ability to communicate with others through spoken language and written word dictates our access to vital resources as well as helping to shape our identity. With effective communication, we could understand and communicate with people in our daily lives. However, there are some people who suffer from some sicknesses such as deafness, mental handicap, Autism and Cerebral Palsy which make them fail in their communication. Social intelligence is the core deficit in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). They tend to have the symptoms of poor eye contact, failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to their developmental level, abnormality in voice and speech intonation, impairment in the use of multiple non-verbal behaviors (such as eye to eye gaze, facial expression, gestures) and failure to spontaneously seek to share enjoyment, interest or achievement with other people[14]. There are three main types of ASD that are most studied: Asperger Syndrome, PDD-NOS and Autistic Disorder. Another two severe autistic-like conditions are Rett Syndrome and Childhood Disintegrative Disorder [13, 7, 9, 4, 5]. The most common ASD is Asperger Syndrome (AS). Children with AS social maturity and social reasoning were delayed and some aspects of their social abilities were quite unusual at any stage of development. They desired to be social, but lacking the skills to do so. Children with AS will have difficulty in making friends, and there were impairments in verbal and non-verbal communication, especially the conversational aspect of language. Bauminger [2] suggested that they need help in understanding social norms and rules and processing social information. Intervention should thus focus on facilitating the child s social understanding capabilities, teaching the ability to read social cues in different social situations; enhancing the capacity for making accurate social interpretation, and expanding the child s repertoire of behavioural alternatives for different social tasks. As a result, the research proposed a portable and affordable communication assistant using the state of art of information communication technology for the benefits of the mentioned community. II. PROTOTYPE We developed ComAssV3, a prototype designed specially for children who suffer from Asperger Syndrome for their speech communication. The prototype enhances communication between the children and people around them, such as their parents and teachers. ComAssV3 enables them to express their needs from time to time. The ComAssV3 includes a function which transmits the children needs to the listener (parents, teachers or caretakers) via Bluetooth technology. By using ComAssV3, the children will be able to express their needs like going to toilet or hunger, as well as states as being happy, sad, or tired. The improved communication will lead to a decrease in disruptive behavior in the disabled children. Consequently, it could also diminish aggressiveness in autistic children. Some of the children injure themselves or show aggressive behavior because they are frustrated that they cannot communicate well with other people. Communication Assistant overcomes the children problems as they are able to communicate with people around them by just a few clicks using the ComAssV3. Generally, there are two main purposes of creating the ComAssV3. The prototype enables teaching and learning process to be done more effectively especially towards the children who suffer from communication problem. The teachers can manage scenarios of each student everyday and let the prototype to replace or reduce the work of teachers. The /10/$26.00 c 2010 IEEE 2227

2 students can take their time going through their profile in the prototype by looking and at images and listening to sounds when they click on the images. Thus, the students can be more independent in the learning process and they can repeat the sound by clicking again the images displayed. In addition, the prototype can be used as a medium of communication between the children and the teachers or parents. The children s daily needs can be put as diagrams in the prototype, and the children can interact with the prototype to express their needs. Some of the children who have difficulty in expressing their needs can utilize this prototype to enable them to communicate with their teachers and parents. The use of Bluetooth technology helps in this context as needs of the children can be sent as message to mobile phones of their teachers or parents nearby. Thus, the children do not need to be taken care of all the time by having the prototype with them. A. ComAssV3 Platform The ComAssV3 platform has two levels of abstraction. The lower level consists of the communicator for the children whereas the higher level is a meta-communicator used to create the communicator which is displayed to the children. The communicator is a hypermedia prototype which enables the users (teachers or parents) to navigate through contents with various scenarios and to design components with images and sounds for each category for their children to express their needs. Each child has his own communicator due to differences in abilities and needs to understand language, capabilities and skills. Information about a child is stored individually in a student profile, where the child will only view and communicate with his own profile. The metacommunicator is used by teachers and parents to configure and create the communicator and then adapt it to each single user (child). Therefore, the users of meta-communicators are the teachers and parents and the end users are the children with need of communication Teacher ComAssV3 Figure 2. Conceptual Structure of ComAssV3 Add Edit Remov Select Profile Details Categories Types Details Categories Types Select Category Select Type B. The Communicator A communicator has categories where children can navigate. The categories are constructed by considering the knowledge domain of the child modeled in a conceptual structure. Each category consists of several types and represents a real-life action that the child knows and can perform. The categories and types are defined by the user profile. Meta- Communicator Communicator Teachers & Parents Children Figure 1. ComAssV3 Architecture Figure 3. ComAssV3 Communicator for student to view different categories th IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applicationsis

3 a) Profiling The key to personalization is individual profiling of users. ComAssV3 is able to support multi-users profiling. Multi-users profiling enables information of each child to be accessed personally by teachers and parents. Each of the children has his/her own profile with the scenarios suitable for him/her. Therefore, the teachers or parents can create and manage different children s profiles easily. Each child s profile is located in a square on the screen which consists of an image and name of the child. If teachers and parents wish to add a new profile, they can just click on the Add from the option on the toolbar. If the teachers and parents wish to edit or remove a child s profile, they can simply select on the profile and choose the action from toolbar menu. of taking care of the children is no longer heavy with the help of ComAssV3. In order to run the program on mobile phones, a library called bluecove jar is used. A program, PhoneSide.jar is created and being installed in a mobile phone. We have tested on a few models of mobile phones on the installation of the program, like LG KF300, Samsung SGH M620, Nokia 6270, Nokia N90, O2 XDA ATOM Nokia 3120, and Sony Ericsson P1i. We found out that only Nokia 3120 and Samsung M620 can allow the prototype to be installed. This may be due to the device configuration that is set for running our prototype. The device configuration is set to CLDC 1.0 whereas the device profile is set to MIDP 2.0. This setting may not be applicable to all the mobile phones that being tested. Furthermore, different manufacturers who produce different hardware in the mobile phones may also contribute to the problem above. ComAssV3 runs on a laptop with Windows operating system. Both the communicator and meta-communicator are developed using Java. Microsoft Office Access is used for the database in this prototype. Figure 4. Children profiling b) Communication Channel ComAssV3 provides two main medium of communications in order to enhance communication between children and people around them. The first medium is the output in sound by using speaker. When the children are using the program, sound as which has been chosen by their teachers or parents will be generated whenever they choose a type in any category (scenario). The sound played can then be heard by the teachers or parents nearby and the children s needs can be fulfilled. If the children press on the same image again, the sound is repeated. Therefore, the children will be able to stress on their needs by selecting a few times on a certain image. Another alternative of delivering the children s needs to their teachers and parents is via Bluetooth messaging. While the sound is played from speaker, a short message with a few words describing the selected image will be sent to the mobile phone nearby the area via Bluetooth. Although Bluetooth technology is only applicable on short distance (approximately 15m, the signal gets weaker if get through obstacles like wall or door), it enables message to be sent when the teachers and parents who are in the house or school but are not beside the children. Therefore, by sending message via Bluetooth, the teachers and parents do not have to pay full attention on the children and can concentrate with their own works. The task C. Meta-Communicator The meta-communicator is used by teachers and parents to create communicator for each of the children. It creates and manages the information stored in different profiles of the children. The meta-communicator has been designed to be used by teachers who do not have much experience with computers. The interfaces of the meta-communicator are therefore very simple and standard. Our meta-communicator has three main functions: 1. Specification of user profile. A child profile will be created first by entering the relevant particulars. Different categories can be chosen as templates by checking the preferred categories given. 2. Representation of knowledge domain (categories). The domain knowledge is necessary for modeling the world perceived by the children in a way that is friendly and closes to them. In the process of constructing user profile, the teachers participate actively to construct and describe the categories that the children can easily recognize and understand. 3. Creation of types in each category. Each category is followed by eight different types of related information where the teachers can add to the user profile. With clear descriptions on the different types of scenario entered by the teacher, a child can understand them well th IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applicationsis 2229

4 The setting of the evaluation environment was the school since that was where the spend most of their days for learning. It has sufficient light and it is dry. There are however certain noise levels that are distracting to the children and since it is the normal atmosphere in the school, we took it into consideration and decide to see how they interact with the prototype with these distractions. Consequently, we evaluated the communication prototype using a 19 inch touch screen LCD monitor, big switch and speakers as interface for them to express their needs. The prototype consists of a lot of images to represent some important aspects in their daily life such as food, feelings, classroom, school and home. The child can touch the image of a cake, the prototype will express aloud the child s need, I want to eat cake! or I want some crayons. Hence, the teacher, parent or caretaker can hear from afar and serve his request. The prototype created a flexible architecture where themes can be created, modified and removed by the user (parent, caretaker or teacher) with images and sounds. This eases the communication of feelings as well, for instance, a child can touch the Thank you image to express aloud his gratitude, Thank you for helping me! This prototype also gives convenience to parents, teacher or caretaker to leave the child on the wheelchair or sofa. Before After Figure 5. User select the Happy Birthday, virtual phone used to test the Bluetooth messaging received that message of Happy Birthday Figure 7. Satisfaction and efficiency scores given by the 25 respondents parents/teachers/caregivers The prototype can be easily installed on a desktop, netbook, smart phone or laptop. Both the parents, caretakers and teachers at the above school commented the prototype is useful and efficient for their children as shown in Figure 7. Figure 6. ComAssV3 Communicator for Teacher to manage profiles TABLE 1 STANDARD DEVIATION AND MEAN FOR THE SATISFACTION AND EFFICIENCY (10 POINT SCALE) III. PROTOTYPE EVALUATION There was an evaluation conducted to investigate how the Communication Assistant could help the children in their communication and learning. A group of 25 children range from 7 to 12 years old from disabled children school participated in the study. The method used in our evaluation of the prototype is observation and questionnaires. We decided to give some tasks to the user and observe as he/she go about accomplishing those tasks Efficiency Satisfaction Std Dev th IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applicationsis Mean

5 TABLE 2TASKS ASSIGNED TO THE PARTICIPANTS 1. You want to tell your caretaker that you want to eat Roti. 2. You want to tell your caretaker that you want to drink "Milo". 3. You want to tell your caretaker that you want to eat "Apple". 4. You want to tell your caretaker that you want to want go the "Toilet". 5. You want to tell your caretaker that you want to watch "Television". 6. You want to tell your caretaker that you are "Happy". 7. You want to tell your caretaker that you have a stomach ache. 8. You are being taught numbers by your teacher and you want You are being taught names of objects by your teacher and you want to point out a pencil. Figure 10 A participant told us that she want a pencil Figure 8. A participant pointed at emotion profile igure 9. A participant showed us that he is thankful Figure 11 A participant told us that she want to eat a piece of kueh We also did a few individual interviews with teachers and parents. There were some positive comments from parents and teachers (75%) that the improved communication from the communication assistant has diminished the aggressiveness and disruptive behaviors in their disabled children. 25% of the parents have not found the proof on the improved communication with their children due to the lack of hardware and facilities at home. However, there are a few limitations of the prototype that being observed. The input sound can only be in the format of *.wav as the prototype, which is developed by using Java, can only take *.wav as the valid sound. Besides that, there are only eight categories available for each child and eight types for each category only. The reason behind is to reduce the risk of unclear view of the prototype when it runs on smaller device. By limiting the number of categories and types for each child, the prototype will always look consistent and easy to be navigated by the children. IV. CONCLUSION We have proposed a flexible model that allows the users to create and modify communicators used by children with communication and learning problems easily. Besides that, a hypermedia communicator that offers interactive multimedia contents (images and sounds) also has been constructed. This approach will be able to improve the daily activities of the th IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applicationsis 2231

6 children as it enhances the communication between them and the people surrounding them. Each child s profile can be managed effectively by his teachers and parents according to his needs. The teachers and parents have an automatic tool (meta-communicator) that helps them to modify the communicators without having to resort to the computer engineers or programmers. Both the communicator and metacommunicator constitute to the ComAssV3. REFERENCES [1] Archambault, D. (2002). Computers for the Development of Young Disabled Children. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 2398, Springer Berlin. [2] Bauminger, N. The Facilitation of Social-Emotional Understanding and Social Interaction in High-Functioning Children with Autism: Intervention Outcomes. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Vol. 32, No. 4, August [3] BIGmac. Accessed December [4] Bregman, J.D. Definitions and Characteristics of the Spectrum. In D. B. Zager, Autism spectrum disorders: identification, education and treatment, 3 rd edition, Chapter 1, pp. 3-46, Routledge, 2005, ISBN [5] Dixon, D. R., Garcia, M. J., Granpeesheh, D. and Tarbox, J. Differential Diagnosis in Autism Spectrum Disorders. In J. L. Matson, Applied Behavior Analysis for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, Chapter 5, pp , Springer, 2009, ISBN: X, [6] Dynavox Technologies. Accessed December [7] First Signs, DSM-IV Criteria PervasiveDevelopmentalDisorders (also known as Autism Spectrum Disorders), adapted from Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed., pp ) Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, Accessed on 6 October [8] Inclusive Technology. Switch Access Devices and Accessories. cessories.html. Accessed December [9] Matson, J.L. and Neal, D. History and Overview. In J. L. Matson, Applied Behavior Analysis for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, Chapter 1, pp. 1-13, Springer, 2009, ISBN: X, [10] Mayer-Johnson. Boardmaker with Speaking Dynamically Pro Combo v6 for Windows. [11] Prentke Romich Company. DeltaTalker. [12] Tobii. Tobii Communicator 4. [13] WebMD Medical Reference, Reviewed by David Hirsch, MD on September 03, Sources from: National Institute of Mental Health: "Autism Spectrum Disorders." National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke: "Asperger Syndrome Fact Sheet." Walker D. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 2004; vol 43: pp [14] Weiss, M. J., LaRue, R. H. and Newcomer, R. H. Social Skills and Autism: Understanding and Addressing the Deficits. In: J. L. Matson: Applied Behavior Analysis for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, Chapter 7, pp , Springer, 2009, ISBN: X, [15] Willemsen-Swinkels S. Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 2002; vol 25: pp Available online Accessed on 6 October [16] Xybernaut. Xyberkids wearable computer th IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applicationsis