Device Developed To Help Socially Challenged

An anonymous reader writes "A device from MIT Media Labs that can pick up on people's emotions is being developed to help people with autism relate to those around them. It will alert its autistic user if the person they are talking to starts showing signs of getting bored or annoyed." From the article: "The 'emotional social intelligence prosthetic' device, which El Kaliouby is constructing along with MIT colleagues Rosalind Picard and Alea Teeters, consists of a camera small enough to be pinned to the side of a pair of glasses, connected to a hand-held computer running image recognition software plus software that can read the emotions these images show. If the wearer seems to be failing to engage his or her listener, the software makes the hand-held computer vibrate."

Comments

Re:So Simple?

[Red Flayer]

" It's interesting that a human could receive image data and be unable to remember what it means, but receive touch data and be able to remember its meaning."

It's not about 'remembering' what it means. It's about interpreting what it means.

"This sounds like an unlikely solution to me, but I have not studied autism."

'Nuff said.

Re:So Simple?

[MobyDisk]

It's interesting that a human could receive image data and be unable to remember what it means, but receive touch data and be able to remember its meaning.

You misunderstand autism. This has nothing to do with memory. Autistic people do not have the facial expression recognition algorithms that most humans have. So someone has implemented such an algorithm on a computer, and then the computer tells the autistic person what the expression means.

If this interaction is correct, then a big high five to the geniuses that found the vibration communication channel into autistic minds. Of course if this is not the case, how will a vibrator help?

The problem was no how to communicate with autistic minds. The vibration is irrelevant. This would work fine with a light, a sound, or a big glowing sign that says "shut up dummy, you are boring them to death!" The point is that the input is unambiguous. Unfortunately, facial expressions are very ambiguous.

As one who has Asperger's,

[Odocoileus]

It might be nice to know when I am losing someone's interest, but, as an Aspie, I really don't have much to say to NT's anyway. I mean if I could hold conversations that interest a NT I wouldn't need the device in the first place. The reality, however, is that conversations that seem to intrigue NT's hold no interest for me. And for some reason I do not get, NT's do not like to talk about the same couple of topics incessantly. I have learned to do the obligatory greetings, but they are best kept short. Anything else is either about business, which has a finite set of interactions (I am fine within my knowledge base), or involves friends that have similar interests. I know some aspies want better communications with the NT world, but knowing when the person is bored would, at least for me, be worse because I still wouldn't know what words to speak to make it better. I guess in the long run maybe, after performing some statistical analysis concerning what words make a person bored. But then again, I pretty much already know that people do not want to talk about scifi or computers or world domination, so it is back to square one.

Re:So Simple?

[pHatidic]

I used to have this problem, but then I just realized I didn't know what to look for. Like me, I'd guess you just have a bad case of Slashdotters. Here are a few signs for starters:

For girls you are seeing across the room: She plays with her hair, licks her lips, smiles at you, will make eye contact with you.

For girls you are interacting with: You squeeze her hand and she squeezes back, you ask her a question and she asks you the question back, you touch her arm and she doesn't flinch or move away, she compliments you on anything, you look like you are going to go somewhere and she asks if she can come, she laughs at your jokes, you walk away and she is waiting for you when you return, she is the one to initiate conversation with you, etc.

How's this help?

[Homestar Breadmaker]

So now someone with autism knows they are boring people, and has a gadget reminding them of the fact. Is this going to help them interact with people better, or just make them feel pressured to try to be interesting when they don't really know how to be interesting, thus making them flustered, overwhelmed, and feel like withdrawing?

Re:So Simple?

[hey!]

The issue is not perception or memory, but of highly specific information processing capabilities that bridge high level geometric perceptions (shapes and so forth) and awareness of the mental state of others. It's rather like having a face-recognition system that detects Osama going through airport security and rings an alarm.

If you want to know what this is like, get married. In most cases, wives have a mechanism that alerts them to things like specks of dirt on the floor that their husbands lack. The husband can see it, it just doesn't enter his consciousness.

Re:So Simple?

[ryanov]

If she laughs when you're not funny -- that one is huge. Or if she ever utters the phrase "you're so funny" (even if you are).

Think, this device could be used to get basement-dwelling nerds dates -- not just for the autistic crowd!

Shocking

[chromozone]

I think more devices like this and others are coming out of the woodwork because psychiatric organizations, big pharma and government facilitators have lost credibility. Pharmaceutical "treatments" for psychological problems have never worked as advertised, and the cat is well out-of-the-bag. The new trend is now "devices".

Even the brain imaging techniques hyped over the last years are being called into question ( "Can Brian Scans See Depression" from the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/18/health/psycholog y/18imag.html?ex=1143867600&en=9d110b78060d7e34&ei =5070 )

Now in the last few months we have had news about "vagus nerve stimulators" to shock people suffering depression (Washington Post)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/03/20/AR2006032001192.html

Then there was also the new GED device(Graduated Electronic Decelerator) which is a new FDA approved device used for "aversion therapy" used to shock retarded people and individuals who can't "control" aggressive or self injurious behaviors (New York Newsday) http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-li shok194670358mar21,0,7313668.story?coll=ny-linews- headlines

I think as the pharmaceutical modality continues to get exposed for the sham it is, there will be more "devices" coming down the pike. I expect they will be described as useful for some "extreme" condition such as retardation, autism etc. but then they will be shown "to have promise" for an expanding group of victims. Most "news" about psychology these days is just marketing.

The "mental health" field is a mess and many of its administrators are not to be trusted.

Keep in mind all this is in addition to what in the US we call The New Freedom Initiative" that allows for programs like Teen Screen; a so-called suicide prevention program concocted at Columbia University. To get all their federal funding schools will have to screen kids (even preteens despite the name)for suicidal tendencies via a short list of questions. Being depressed for more than 2 weeks is one sign and one of the signs of depression is not liking school (if you can imagine that).

Of course the drug companies lobbied for this, and the corrupt and psycho-politically motivated psychiatric associations are in full support. Sadly the Bush administration is also behind this and its based on a program from Texas. Of course there is little in the media about all this.

The bats are trully in the belfry and it is the inmates running the asylum and I feel bad for kids who have to grow up under this sort of crap.

Re:So Simple?

[gstoddart]

I'll take a stab at this ...

For girls you are seeing across the room: She plays with her hair, licks her lips, smiles at you, will make eye contact with you.

Can you accurately identify when she is looking at you or someone else? Do you think all such such signals are as overt as licking the lips? The signals can be a lot more muted and ambiguous, so it can be in a gray area where you can miss something subtle -- or hope to see something which isn't there. If she is NOT currently looking at you is that a summary rejection since all interested people are looking? Nor everyone is likely to have contact initiated based on their looks; you as like as not could go completely unnoticed.

For girls you are interacting with: You squeeze her hand and she squeezes back, you ask her a question and she asks you the question back, you touch her arm and she doesn't flinch or move away, she compliments you on anything, you look like you are going to go somewhere and she asks if she can come, she laughs at your jokes, you walk away and she is waiting for you when you return, she is the one to initiate conversation with you, etc.

But, you've put the cart before the horse. If you're already at the hand-squeezing stage, you're probably in posession of a few non-ambiguous signals. You also wouldn't use body contact to define some of the earlier stages of human interaction -- it could be completely inappropriate, and you'll seem a bigger dork. Have you tacitly been granted permission to be that close? Or are you just a bungling goon who wants to know if you touch her, she'll flinch?

I can be socially awkward. I find it difficult to engage in social contact with new people. I can't imagine someone with a 'real' disorder being given nice codified things like you've done and be expected to apply them. Because they are, after all, subjective and hit-and-miss in terms of their predictive value.

Even with my own 'plain old' (*) social awkwardness/geekiness, I don't think I could apply some of your cues -- at least not in the grossly simplified way you put them. There is just too much ambiguity in interpreting the responses from people, and I can't often tell where in that range something might lie.

(*) I'm neither Autistic, nor do I have Asberger's -- but like most human behaviour, I believe it's on a continuum, and I might have some of those characteristics without actually having the affliction per se.

I don't think you have Apsberger's

[Anonymous Coward]

you're probably just a pompous ass.

Autism, Other Minds, and Religion

[Pfhorrest]

The autistic individual tends to treat everything as an object, and they can recognize form and substance, but not emotionality. However, they can learn it, given enough conditioning and reinforcement, albeit it is very artificial and prone to error if certain situations occur which were not anticipated.

As someone who is naturally very autistic but has learned to understand the neurotypical mindset, I can tell you that this is dead-on.

The big difference between a neurotypical and an autistic mindset is that autistics see everything literally, as it is, and do not like to jump to conclusions based on insufficient data. (Though we are often very good at pattern recognition and educated guessing, we recognize that these are guesses and don't mistake them for facts). This quickly gives rise to the typical 'defining characteristic' of an autistic personality in not recognizing others' emotional states, because *there is no direct evidence that people other than the observer feel anything*. An individual's only experience of "inner experiences" is their own, and it is by definition impossible to experience another's inner experiences. To the procedurally-oriented autistic mind, this leads to the conclusion that there's no reason to suspect that such "other people's inner experiences" exist. It's an alien concept to the autistic.

To the neurotypical, certain behaviors exhibited by other people resemble their own behaviors which are triggered, it seems, by "emotions" or "inner experiences", and so the neurotypical jumps to the conclusion that other people have such inner experiences - that there is some "self" or "I" or "ego" or "soul" that is feeling and thinking in there, and not just a bunch of matter that behaves in certain complex ways. I believe this also explains why severely neurotypical people are so prone to religious beliefs in God or gods - if you're already making the jump to ascribe agency (a necessarily undetectable quality) to certain objects we call "people", why not ascribe such agency to other objects or phenomena, or the universe as a whole?

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this is a bad thing to do. In fact it's something that borderline autistic cases like your typical geek are often very comfortable with - the anthropomorphization of computer programs that don't "like" each other, or which "fight" over certain resources, or which "talk" to one another. Geeks understand that these aren't literally true descriptions, inasmuch as we are not ascribing inner experience to these programs, but they are very useful, convenient, and accurate shorthand for describing their behaviors. It doesn't take much to realize that talk of other people's thoughts and feelings and inner experiences is really just the same sort of short hand, and that to any given person's honest and literal perspective, all other people really *are* just objects. (Which is not to say that they should be treated unethically or that there is no basis for ethics, but that's a whole other can of worms there).

And it doesn't take a whole lot more to go ahead and extend this shorthand to other complex systems, or even the universe as a whole; and from that comes a sort of pantheistic view of God. To talk of "God" is just to ascribe agency to the whole universe, a thinking feeling intelligence "behind" it all, the same way that we can ascribe agency to other people. Both of these cases are equally valid or invalid. They're invalid in that neither one is literally true, inasmuch as it's fundamentally impossible to ever have evidence that they are true, and so we have no real reason to ever think that they are true. But they are both valid, inasmuch as the ascription of agency to other people, and understanding the nature of those "agents", is useful for modelling interactions between people (including yourself) which should ultimately be of benefit to the individual using this model; and likewise, the ascription of agency to the universe and the understanding its nature (even in personified terms) p