Assistive Technology Device for Autistic Children

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurological condition characterized by challenges in social interaction, communication, and repetitive behaviors, requiring tailored support for daily living and learning. Assistive devices will help individuals with ASD to enhance communication, improve social skills, and promote independence. This work focuses on developing a device for autistic children that assists in (i) basic communication (ii) expressing and understanding emotions (iii) safeguarding against high intensity light and (iv) remind them of their daily routines. Basic communication is supported by designing speech generation and speech understanding systems. Assistance for expressing emotions is provided by enabling emotion teaching based on their health status. Emotion recognition is supported by designing a system that can explain the emotion of others. This system recognizes 4 emotions: happy, sad, angry, neutral. The system was able to recognize emotions of normal faces with an accuracy of 70 % and that of autistic children with an accuracy of 62.5 % when tested with 20 images for each class.