A Study on the Perceptions of Autistic Adolescents towards Mainstream Emotion Recognition Technologies

Autistic people have difficulties in recognizing and expressing emotions from/to other people. Technologies can help to facilitate the communication and understanding between autistic and other people. This work particularly investigates the requirements autistic adolescents have on technologies that can measure bodily responses to recognize their emotions. A smartwatch, smartpatch and infrared camera were evaluated as potential everyday use devices to measure emotion. User requirements on emotion recognition technologies were elicited through an online survey (73 completed responses) and ten semi-structured interviews with autistic adolescents. The smartwatch is the preferred product, followed by the smart-patch. Infrared cameras are deemed unsuitable devices.This research was partly funded by the research project “Progress in Computer Architectures for Automatic Learning using Heterogeneous Sources: Health and Well-Being Applications” (TIN2015-71873-R)