DailyConnect: A Mobile Aid that Assists the Understanding of Situation-based Emotions for Children with ASDs

Abstract

The understanding of situation-based emotions is of great significance for children, as it is able to assist children to better understand other people's behaviors in certain emotional scenarios and also to understand how their behaviors and actions can affect others. However, children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) might have difficulties associating situations with emotions. In this paper, we presented the design of DailyConnect, a visual-based mobile application that supports children with ASDs to recall memories by reviewing photos based on their personal experience, and then taught by their teachers to understand situation-based emotions. There are two types of user modes for parents and teachers respectively in the system. For parents, the system enables them to upload daily-life photos associated with descriptions of contexts and behaviors of the child. For teachers, the system enables them to guide the children to recall what happened by reviewing the uploaded photos, and adopts the Discrete Trial Training (DTT) teaching technique to help the children understand situation-based emotions. Through recalling the memories of the children's real-life experience, the system enables teachers and parents to help children build emotions and situations associations step by step, including the understanding of contexts, emotional cues, emotions recognition, facial expression recognition and learn expected responses. Moreover, the system can provide individual feedback for each child to achieve targeted training after a long-term use: by analyzing of the data recording of the children (if with their consent), the system is able to generate reports on which step of the understanding situation-based emotions needs attention for each child respectively.