Abstract
Children affected by Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) exhibit behaviors that may vary drastically from child to child. The goal of achieving accurate computer simulations of behavioral responses to given stimuli for different ASD severities is a difficult one, but it could unlock interesting applications such as informing the algorithms of agents designed to interact with those individuals. This paper demonstrates a novel research direction for high-level simulation of behaviors of children with ASD by exploiting the structure of available ASD diagnosis tools. Building on the observation that the simulation process is in fact the reverse of the diagnosis process, we take advantage of the structure of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS), a state-of-the-art standardized tool used by therapists to diagnose ASD, in order to build our ADOS-Based Autism Simulator (ABASim). We first define the ADOS-Based Autism Space (ABAS), a feature space that captures individual behavioral differences. Using this space as a high-level behavioral model, the simulator is able to stochastically generate behavioral responses to given stimuli, consistent with provided child descriptors, namely ASD severity, age and language ability. Our method is informed by and generalizes from real ADOS data collected on 67 children with different ASD severities, whose correlational profile is used as our basis for the generation of the feature vectors used to select behaviors.
Notes
- 1.
According to a 2014 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
- 2.
Our work uses version 2 of the tool, namely ADOS-2, but for simplicity we refer to it by ADOS throughout the paper.
- 3.
The ADOS data used in this research are part of a database for autistic children that the ASD group, at the Child Development Center of the Hospital Garcia de Orta (Lisbon, Portugal), keeps for statistical purposes. All data was anonymous; only age and gender were collected from the sample for biographical characterization.
- 4.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the FCT CMUP-ERI/HCI/0051/2013 grant and national funds through Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) with reference UID/CEC/50021/2013. We would like to thank the Child Development Center at Hospital Garcia de Orta (Almada, Portugal), Dr. Marta Couto, and the INSIDE project for giving us access to and assistance with the data used in this research. We also thank Patrick Lin, Jocelyn Huang, and Minji Kim for their contributions on the code. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors only.
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Baraka, K., Melo, F.S., Veloso, M. (2017). Simulating Behaviors of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders Through Reversal of the Autism Diagnosis Process. In: Oliveira, E., Gama, J., Vale, Z., Lopes Cardoso, H. (eds) Progress in Artificial Intelligence. EPIA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10423. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65340-2_61
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