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Upgraded Google Glass helps autistic kids “see” emotions

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Re: Upgraded Google Glass helps autistic kids “see” emotions

#71

Post by wccrawford »

btilly wrote: post #23
DoreenMichele wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lousy assumption then. Ick. Expect better of parents. I yelled at my special-needs son for opening the oven door and using it as a stepping stool to see what I was cooking. I wasn't mad. I was scared he would climb on it while the oven was hot. Because I wasn't mad and he heard me yell "no!!!" at full volume, he thought that's just how you pronounced the word and yelled it the first two weeks he began using it…

I wasn't mad. I was scared he would climb on it while the oven was hot. The other fear here should be that it acts like a lever. The kid doesn't have to be that heavy to cause a free-standing stove to tip over. This is not a hypothetical danger. https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2010/11/one-year-ol... reports that over a thousand kids per year get injured this way and on average 1-2 of them die.

There is supposed to be something at the back of the stove to prevent it from tipping over. Ours had a little device that surrounded one of the feet to do this. The installer said it was now required by law.

Re: Upgraded Google Glass helps autistic kids “see” emotions

#72

Post by Kaiyou »

kgarten wrote: post #69

Such studies, papers and news always makes me cringe. It seems overly engineered with limited usefulness. Superpower glass … really? As background I work in public research and have no background in Autism research. Yet, due to a mutual friend, I was lucky to meet Kelly Hunter, and attend one of her workshops (together with several other researchers working on helping autistic children). I knew the Stanford project,…

What's the point of knowing someone is angry if you do not know why he is angry? Detecting emotions doesn't strike me as particularly useful. Manipulating emotions of others on the other hand,...

Re: Upgraded Google Glass helps autistic kids “see” emotions

#73

Post by throwawaynerdy »

scarejunba wrote: post #15
DoreenMichele wrote: post #11

It sounds to me like you could do a lot more to just educate the parents. You don't get mad and shout at a young child who has decided to put the silverware away. You talk to them about the process of making and serving dinner. He could have been shown that one way to make the silverware more orderly is set the table for everyone while Mom cooks. That was my response to my then five year old being impatient with dinn…

Situation is fictional to illustrate utility of device.

Maybe I'm out of the loop but I think the issues was that it was never made for consumer use.

I had plenty of uses for simple hands off first person recording. Sports and school events would have benefitted from video recording.

Seeing their enterprise use, I'm thinking other people had a similar idea.

Re: Upgraded Google Glass helps autistic kids “see” emotions

#74

Post by hammock »

z3t4 wrote: post #67
im3w1l wrote: post #31

I wonder what effect this will have on our culture long term. It would be unfortunate if Glass' determination ends being seen as the ground truth. I have noticed a certain phenomenon where people who are bad at something read books about it to compensate, and then having read books on the subjects start considering themselves experts on it and preach to others, closing the loop from descriptive to prescriptive. Edite…

Only a beginner can teach a beginner. First you struggle. Then you think you know it all. Then you forget what was so hard. Then you master it. And then you realize you know very little.

"Sophomore" is a term for second-year students (not even halfway done) that means "wise fool" referring to how they're at a level where they think they're smarter than they are, and they don't yet know what they don't know.

Re: Upgraded Google Glass helps autistic kids “see” emotions

#75

Post by philliphaydon »

Kaiyou wrote: post #72
kgarten wrote: post #69

Such studies, papers and news always makes me cringe. It seems overly engineered with limited usefulness. Superpower glass … really? As background I work in public research and have no background in Autism research. Yet, due to a mutual friend, I was lucky to meet Kelly Hunter, and attend one of her workshops (together with several other researchers working on helping autistic children). I knew the Stanford project,…

What's the point of knowing someone is angry if you do not know why he is angry? Detecting emotions doesn't strike me as particularly useful. Manipulating emotions of others on the other hand,...

Knowing someone is angry allows you to act accordingly.

If you don't know someone is sad how do you console them?

There's a great comedy on Netflix called Atypical, one of the things the main character deals with in this show is his inability to read peoples emotions.

Re: Upgraded Google Glass helps autistic kids “see” emotions

#76

Post by msla »

hammock wrote: post #74
z3t4 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only a beginner can teach a beginner. First you struggle. Then you think you know it all. Then you forget what was so hard. Then you master it. And then you realize you know very little.

"Sophomore" is a term for second-year students (not even halfway done) that means "wise fool" referring to how they're at a level where they think they're smarter than they are, and they don't yet know what they don't know.

Sadly, if an etymology seems clever, it's likely false:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/sophomore

> 1680s, "student in the second year of university study," literally "arguer," altered from sophumer (1650s, from sophume, archaic variant form of sophism), probably by influence of folk etymology derivation from Greek sophos "wise" + mōros "foolish, dull" (see moron). The original reference might be to the dialectic exercises that formed a large part of education in the middle years. At Oxford and Cambridge, a sophister (from sophist with spurious -er as in philosopher) was a second- or third-year student (what Americans would call a "junior" might be a senior sophister).

Re: Upgraded Google Glass helps autistic kids “see” emotions

#77

Post by chiyuri »

timwaagh wrote: post #62
skissane wrote: post #3

It is worth noting that difficulties in recognising emotions in faces are by no means unique to ASD; they also occur in ADHD [1], anxiety disorders [2], schizophrenia [3], and probably other psychiatric/neurodevelopmental disorders as well. So, if this technology has value, its value would be a lot broader than only ASD. (As an aside, a lot of people tend to have this narrow focus on just ASD to the exclusion of othe…

That makes good sense. ASD is a catch all term for those with certain symptoms that are unexplained by other factors. Schizophrenia and anxiety disorders would be some of those other factors. Not sure about ADHD.

There is substantial comorbidity with ASD and ADHD. ADHD occurs in ~4.4% of the general population, but with ASD that goes up to ~45% (the margin of error is massive on the latter)

Some of the symptoms of ADHD, like RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria), sound very much like ASD traits rather than ADHD traits.

In the future I think we'll find a lot more underlying commonalities of all of these conditions. OCD, GID (gender identity disorder), misophonia, tourettes and more are also strikingly comorbid within ASD.

Re: Upgraded Google Glass helps autistic kids “see” emotions

#78

Post by trombonechamp »

kgarten wrote: post #69

Such studies, papers and news always makes me cringe. It seems overly engineered with limited usefulness. Superpower glass … really? As background I work in public research and have no background in Autism research. Yet, due to a mutual friend, I was lucky to meet Kelly Hunter, and attend one of her workshops (together with several other researchers working on helping autistic children). I knew the Stanford project,…

It turns out that people with autism do have difficulty detecting emotions. A classic task in the lab is the "reading the mind in the eyes" task (http://socialintelligence.labinthewild.org/mite/), whereby individuals need to identify the emotion someone is expressing by looking at a picture of their eyes. People with autism consistently show lower scores than healthy controls.

Will improving the ability to detect emotions improve clinical outcomes? We don't know, but their initial evidence looks promising: take a look at the JAMA Pediatrics paper (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...) and the Nature Digital Medicine paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-018-0035-3), which are both linked to in the article:

Would a therapy like the one you described be better than a technology like this? Maybe. But therapy also very expensive, time consuming, and prohibitive for people who don't have time to take their kid to it every week. We are always looking for new approaches. Even if technology like this doesn't work out, learning why it doesn't work will be helpful for developing future treatments which are better. Remember that this is active research, not an established methodology. (Don't be put off by the "breakthrough therapy" designation mentioned in the article, which is a bureaucratic technical term used by the FDA.)

The paper you linked to is about monitoring, and is not useful by itself without a therapist to interpret it and evaluate it. There is not yet established methodology on how to use this kind of data.

On a related note, there has been a lot of interest recently in real-time feedback for enhanced therapy and treatment. There is a growing literature on neurofeedback in particular, such as reducing depression symptoms by training someone to control their neural activity (e.g. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb7bgNo3sUs). Exciting stuff!

Re: Upgraded Google Glass helps autistic kids “see” emotions

#79

Post by derefr »

z3t4 wrote: post #67
im3w1l wrote: post #31

I wonder what effect this will have on our culture long term. It would be unfortunate if Glass' determination ends being seen as the ground truth. I have noticed a certain phenomenon where people who are bad at something read books about it to compensate, and then having read books on the subjects start considering themselves experts on it and preach to others, closing the loop from descriptive to prescriptive. Edite…

Only a beginner can teach a beginner. First you struggle. Then you think you know it all. Then you forget what was so hard. Then you master it. And then you realize you know very little.

And yet, oddly, sometimes mastery confers the inability to teach something, because most of what you now know, you never learned in association to a structured explanation, only in association to your own trained reflexes.

People who learn a second language understand its grammar from the first stroke, since it’s taught along with the language. People who learn a first language recognize its grammar (i.e. they can tell you whether or not something is grammatical) but don’t understand it, because they picked the language up “naturally.”

Often a master will come to a sophomore student and ask them to explain a concept to the juniors (after checking their explanation for not having any faults the master can find), because a usual master’s explanation (presuming the master isn’t also a master of education) is far less useful to a junior’s understanding than a sophomore’s is. The master is aware of nuances that greatly affect the end result, but aren’t so relevant at first; while the sophomore is aware mostly of things in the order they’ve managed to absorb them so far—which likely reflects the order of least-to-most difficult to absorb, and so reflects the things the juniors would be most likely to be struggling with.

Re: Upgraded Google Glass helps autistic kids “see” emotions

#80

Post by kgarten »

trombonechamp wrote: post #78
kgarten wrote: post #69

Such studies, papers and news always makes me cringe. It seems overly engineered with limited usefulness. Superpower glass … really? As background I work in public research and have no background in Autism research. Yet, due to a mutual friend, I was lucky to meet Kelly Hunter, and attend one of her workshops (together with several other researchers working on helping autistic children). I knew the Stanford project,…

It turns out that people with autism do have difficulty detecting emotions. A classic task in the lab is the "reading the mind in the eyes" task ( http://socialintelligence.labinthewild.org/mite/ ), whereby individuals need to identify the emotion someone is expressing by looking at a picture of their eyes. People with autism consistently show lower scores than healthy controls. Will improving the ability to detect e…

Therapists that worked 10 -20 years in the field are maybe better than some tech that's not even thoroughly evaluated? Sorry that made me chuckle. Check some of the videos. The children I saw in the workshops (who played Shakespeare at the end), would have just taken the Google glass and threw it to the ground as soon as they would have been angry. There were a lot of dangerous situations in the workshops, that therapists could just avert due to their training ... The article and the research paper oversimplify the problem. This is just useful for a very small minority of autistic children. Autism is a spectrum and it is very complicated.
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