Task Detection of ASD Children by Analyzing Robotic Enhanced and Standard Human Therapy

An indispensable part of life is social interaction. Without any doubt, it can help to overcome Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). ASD is defined as an abnormality in social communication, which is not a disease. So, to face this disorder, involvement in social communication is required. It can be possible through therapy sessions. In this modern era, not only the human but also a robot can play the role of the interaction partner during these sessions. To examine the behavior of the child with ASD, data is required, which is not possible to get all the time. From this thought, the DREAM dataset paves the way to evaluate the Robot Enhanced Therapy and records the data of the 61 children with ASD. The dataset provides the skeleton-based, gaze-based features, which were recorded by the RGB-D cameras. Besides, characteristics of the therapy and age, gender, ID number of a child are also provided. In this paper, we have proposed a method to classify the tasks (Imitation, Joint Attention, and Turn-Taking) accomplished by those children provided in the dataset. Further analysis is also executed by us to assess if a robot can be a substitute for humans to conduct the therapy session. Skeleton joint positions and gaze-based vectors are utilized to draw out the angles, distances between joints, and the coordinate direction angles, Direction Gaze Zone (DGZ), respectively. From the skeleton-based approach, statistical features (such as mean, median, standard deviation, minimum, and maximum), and from the gaze-based approach, mean frequency, the number of peaks of a signal of the frequency domain are obtained. Therefore, the entire analysis is evaluated from two perspectives. The ensemble methods such as Random Forest classifier, XGBoost classifier, Extra Trees classifier are deployed to obtain the predicted result from the test data. The results are satisfactory considering the challenge and complexity of the ASD domain. We have explored how robots can be an alternative to humans for the improvement of social communication among children with ASD.