Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Upgraded Google Glass helps autistic kids “see” emotions

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 108 posts

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

#81

Post by kgarten »

philliphaydon wrote: post #75
Kaiyou wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See this is the problem a lot of children on the spectrum don't know how to react (or will react in an atypical fashion) ... You need to train interactions (and changes in emotions during communication).

There might be something useful coming out of it, yet it might also do more harm than good.

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

#83

Post by watertom »

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,…

Autism is a spectrum disorder, which means there is a wide range of afflictions, and the afflictions range from very, very mild to debilitating.

Conducting research for something that is spectrum based is frustrating because researchers can only target one small area. The approach is necessary in order to tackle the problem because the problem is so large, we'll need a lot of researchers working on a lot of very focused areas in order to move forward in a broad fashion.

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

#85

Post by wpietri »

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,...

It's a start. You're unlikely to learn why somebody is angry unless you know that somebody is angry. And humans are very good correlators. If me doing X repeatedly leads to immediate anger, I'll learn not to do it even if I don't understand why.

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

#86

Post by wpietri »

derefr wrote: post #79
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.

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 te…

Is that odd?

I think of teaching something as a separate skill. As you say, teaching is about helping a student where they are. Mastering topic X doesn't convey knowledge of how students A, B, and C each relate to topic X.

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

#87

Post by wpietri »

chiyuri wrote: post #77
timwaagh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (gen…

There was a great Philosophy Bites podcast that talked about the high comorbidity of mental disorders. This one, I think: https://philosophybites.com/2016/01/steven-hyman-on-categori...

The point that stuck with me is that, as you say, the high comorbidity is strong evidence that we have a bad model of the situation. Part of that for me is the medicalization of deviance.

As an example, I saw a bit on Twitter from an autism researcher who was sitting in on a young girl getting tested for autism. She was shown an animation of triangles moving around in a way that neurotypicals would anthropomorphize: https://twitter.com/DrRubySapphire/status/123278780736346112...

She described how the triangles moved instead of humanizing them. She recognized that they looked like they were playing, but knew that triangles didn't have minds. That was marked as a failure, a sign of sickness. Not because she was wrong, but because she was different from the norm.

I think a lot about the world where we just accept that there are a bunch of different kinds of people and stop trying to fit them all into one mold. Where we make the world work for all of them, not just the "normal" ones (which, historically, seems to mean straight, white, moneyed, neurotypical men of a particular body type).

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

#88

Post by kgarten »

watertom wrote: post #83
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,…

Autism is a spectrum disorder, which means there is a wide range of afflictions, and the afflictions range from very, very mild to debilitating. Conducting research for something that is spectrum based is frustrating because researchers can only target one small area. The approach is necessary in order to tackle the problem because the problem is so large, we'll need a lot of researchers working on a lot of very focu…

Completely agree, yet I think this should be reflected in the article.

From the limited exposure I had with children on the spectrum, I didn’t see many that could actually wear a google glass to use it as described in the article. I also don’t understand the benefit of the device itself. It’s not designed for autism, the interventions seem simplicstic ,battery life is highly limited, it‘s very fragile ... if it’s for short interactions and games (like they describe in the papers) I wonder what the advantage of the head mounted display is compared to other setups. they don’t do any comparisons.

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

#90

Post by briefcomment »

saagarjha wrote: post #7
briefcomment wrote: post #6

Interesting that emojis of faces can be identified but not actual faces. Is this because the emoji is just much simpler to process?

Emoji faces look identical while people differ in their facial expressions and how they choose to show them.

Sure, but you would think that after seeing your parents' expressions for year's you would start to recognize them eventually too. I'm wondering what makes symbols that much easier to understand.
Post reply on HN