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Presentation

Interpersonal communication relies on complex processing of multimodal emotional cues such as facial expression and tone-of-voice. Unfortunately, children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) have disabilities to understand and produce these socio-emotional signals.

Various solutions have been proposed to help children to develop communication skills but most of these solutions focus on what children succeed to understand about human emotion by analyzing faces. They try to learn how to puzzle out information to recognize emotion like joy, sadness and disgust.

However, only few studies deal with the production of emotion by children with ASD. This is mainly due to the lack of efficient technological tools to analyze children behavior. Recent advances in the field of automatic emotion recognition offer new opportunities to assess the quality of emotions produced by children. JEMImE aims at designing new emotion recognition algorithms in order to extend the features currently used in the JEStiMulE serious game (a multisensory serious game for training emotional comprehension and social cognition of individuals with ASD).

The goal of the serious game developed in JEMImE project is to help children with ASD to learn to mimic facial and vocal emotions and to express the proper emotion depending on the context. Such a tool will be very useful for the children to learn to produce emotions and for the practitioner to quantify progress.

Scientific and technological breakthroughs in emotion characterization may significantly improve understanding and evaluating natural productions of children. For example, this implies to be able to define metrics to quantify how much the behavior is relevant. From a technological point of view, algorithms need to be able to analyze spontaneous behavior of children in a realistic environment. That means to design robust, real-time and multimodal methods, pushing forward the current state- of-the-art in unconstrained emotion recognition.

To achieve this goal, the project brings together major academic and industrial players with complementary skills in automatic emotion recognition, serious game design and treatment of children with autism.