An Intelligent Three Dimensional Learning Environment for Enhancing Social Communication Skills in Infants and Toddlers

用于增强婴幼儿社交沟通技能的智能三维学习环境

• 批准号: 9215356
• 负责人: Zachary E Warren
• 金额: $ 22.31万
• 依托单位: VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-02-01 至 2019-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9215356
• 关键词: Address; Age; Architecture; Area; Attention; Behavior; Behavior Therapy; Caregivers; Caring; Child; Child Behavior; Clinical; Cues; Detection; Development; Diagnosis; Dimensions; Disease; Early Diagnosis; Early Intervention; Emotions; Environment; Environment Design; Etiology; Evaluation; Expert Systems; Eye; Family; Future; Gestures; Goals; Health Services Accessibility; High Prevalence; Human; Infant; Intervention; Language; Learning; Learning Skill; Liquid substance; Mainstreaming; Measurement; Measures; Mediating; Names; Neurodevelopmental Disorder; Outcome; Population; Protocols documentation; Provider; Research; Research Design; Resources; Robotics; Sampling; Social Impacts; Social support; System; Technology; Testing; Thinking; Time; Toddler; Translating; Treatment Cost; Validation; Work; autism spectrum disorder; base; communication behavior; cost; design; economic cost; educational atmosphere; experience; gaze; improved; innovation; joint attention; new technology; operation; response; service intervention; skills; social; social attention; social communication; social learning; support tools; temporal measurement; tool

Project Summary Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a common and costly neurodevelopmental disorder with core deficits related to social communication. There is growing empirical support suggesting that early intervention can significantly improve specific early social communication skills (i.e., joint attention and social orienting) and that such improvements partially mediate improvements in other critical developmental areas, including broad social and language outcomes. Unfortunately, many families struggle greatly to access appropriate, effective early intervention services at young ages due to resource limitations, including: limited access to services, delays and waits related to identification/treatment, a limited number of expert providers, as well as barriers related to the cost of treatment. There is an urgent need for the development of new tools and paradigms that can help advance access to powerful interventions across resource-strained systems. One potential new paradigm involves attempting to harness the abilities of sophisticated technological platforms to address ASD concerns. The primary goal of the current research is to refine, augment, and test the ability of an innovative, intelligent technological architecture and system specifically designed to address early social communication vulnerabilities in children with ASD. We explicitly do not propose this technology as a stand-alone intervention nor as a replacement for existing necessary intervention and care at later ages. Rather, we propose it as a critical test of a new technological tool and paradigm for thinking about advanced early detection and action regarding early social communication concerns and ASD. We will test the ability of our innovative three- dimensional intelligent learning environment to detect and meaningfully respond to core social communication behaviors evidenced during caregiver interactions. Simply, the environment will be designed to help young children more often respond to their names, follow gaze and common gestures, and coordinate social attention in interactions with their caregivers. Future rigorous study and understanding of this system’s ability to bolster these early pivotal social communication skills could lay the groundwork for radically different future intervention approaches. In the current work, we will first refine and augment our existing intelligent technological architecture, currently capable of detecting and inferring social attention in real-time as well as providing prompts based on this detection, to create a robust and powerful blended technological and social learning platform. We will then evaluate the ability of this technology to operate fluidly and autonomously with a clinical sample. The expected benefit of this research could be tremendous. It would, for the first time, allow for the systematic evaluation of an innovative, technologically-mediated ASD intervention platform for very young children that could readily translate into meaningful real-world use at a critical point in development.

项目摘要 自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）是一种常见且昂贵的神经发育障碍 与社会交流有关的缺陷。越来越多的经验支持表明早期干预 可以显着提高特定的早期社会沟通能力（即共同关注和社会定位），并且 这样的改进会部分改善其他关键发展领域，包括广泛的 社会和语言结果。不幸的是，许多家庭在努力获得适当，有效的 由于资源限制，年轻年龄段的早期干预服务，包括：有限的服务访问， 与身份/治疗，有限数量的专家提供商以及障碍有关的延迟和等待 与治疗成本有关。迫切需要开发新工具和范式 可以帮助推动跨资源构造的系统访问强大的干预措施。一个潜在的新 范式涉及试图利用复杂技术平台的能力来解决ASD 关注。当前研究的主要目标是完善，增强和测试创新的能力， 专门旨在解决早期社会交流的智能技术架构和系统 ASD儿童的脆弱性。我们明确不建议这项技术作为独立干预 也不是替代后来现有的必要干预和护理。相反，我们将其作为一个 对新的技​​术工具和范式的批判性测试，以思考高级早期检测和动作 关于早期的社会交流问题和ASD。我们将测试我们创新三的能力 - 维度智能学习环境以检测并有意义地响应核心社会交流 在照顾者互动过程中证明了行为。简而言之，环境将旨在帮助年轻人 孩子们经常回应自己的名字，遵循目光和共同的手势，并协调社会关注 在与护理人员的互动中。未来严格的研究和理解该系统的能力 这些早期的关键社会沟通技巧可能为根本不同的未来奠定基础 干预方法。在当前的工作中，我们将首先完善并增强现有的智能 技术架构，目前能够实时检测和推断社会关注以及 根据此检测提供提示，以创建强大而强大的混合技术和社会 学习平台。然后，我们将评估该技术与 临床样本。这项研究的预期好处可能是巨大的。这是第一次允许 为了系统地评估创新的，技术介导的ASD干预平台 可以轻松地转化为有意义的现实世界中的幼儿在开发的关键点。