22 ms·

Upgraded Google Glass helps autistic kids “see” emotions

266 points by sohkamyung 7y ago

gowld 7y ago
Some good info written in annoying marketing press release style. Would be good to get this as a phone app with a headmounted camera, since that's far cheaper than Google Glass + doctor's prescription.
- jasonlotito 7y ago
  > The glasses are not meant to be a permanent prosthesis. The kids do 20-minute sessions a few times a week in their own homes, and the entire intervention currently lasts for six weeks. Children are expected to quickly learn how to detect the emotions of their social partners and then, after they’ve gained social confidence, stop using the glasses.
skissane 7y ago
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 other psychiatric/neurodevelopmental disorders, despite the fact that all these disorders have lots of overlap and rather fuzzily defined boundaries. None of the symptoms of ASD are unique to ASD; they all occur in other conditions also; given that all treatments for ASD are treating symptoms rather than the unknown underlying causes, any therapy for any ASD symptom is very likely to also work for other disorders in which the same symptom is expressed.) [1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Da_Fonseca/publication/23134164_Emotion_Understanding_in_Children_with_ADHD/links/542a51de0cf27e39fa8e7dc2.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Da_Fonseca/public... [2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christopher_Monk2/publication/7573340_Emotion_Recognition_Deficits_in_Pediatric_Anxiety_Disorders_Implications_for_Amygdala_Research/links/57c0a3f908aeb95224d4a508/Emotion-Recognition-Deficits-in-Pediatric-Anxiety-Disorders-Implications-for-Amygdala-Research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christopher_Monk2/publi... [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006322300008477 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...
- SilasX 7y ago
  Yeah, that was my initial reaction (though without your knowledge of the topic): there are a lot of people who could benefit from this, not just those with autism.
- timwaagh 7y ago
  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.
  - chiyuri 7y ago
    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.
    - wpietri 7y ago
      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-categorising-mental-disorders.html 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/1232787807363461120 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).
tines 7y ago
I imagine that there are nuances to facial expression that might be difficult to extract from an image or video, depending on the parameters to your ML model. For example, if someone looks into my eyes, furrows their brows, and shakes their head slowly back and forth, this could mean that they are intensely sympathetic with me (when I am talking), or it could mean that they are disgusted with what I have said (when I have stopped talking), or many other things. If you add sound input to your model then maybe it can figure out how to incorporate that dimension into its results. Very cool though. Maybe you could have something like this to help colorblind people see colors, deaf people see sounds, the possibilities are exciting.
- goodside 7y ago
  I assume there are potential users who can’t easily perceive furrowing of brows, but who could infer its context-dependent meaning if it were made more obvious when it’s happening.
pishpash 7y ago
Is this a claim that computers are better at emotions than some humans? Something does not sit well.
- carlinmack 7y ago
  this robot can walk better than a disabled human in a wheelchair? something does not sit well.
  - inportb 7y ago
    The robot does not sit well.
- trevyn 7y ago
  Identifying emotions, yes.
- ksk 7y ago
  Seems like its a soft push for creepy ad-tech from Google. Google will happily mine this data and eventually roll it into their ad business, while claiming its "anonymized".
- seanhunter 7y ago
  "Autism" is a term that is used to denote a complex set of neurological stuff, but one common theme is that autistic people have difficulty making sense of the deluge of sensory input. I could see how something which helps to simplify this could be helpful for some autistic people. So yes. Wouldn't work for everyone- My brother was severely autistic and he would have just smashed the glasses.
briefcomment 7y ago
Interesting that emojis of faces can be identified but not actual faces. Is this because the emoji is just much simpler to process?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Emoji faces look identical while people differ in their facial expressions and how they choose to show them.
  - briefcomment 7y ago
    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.
hrdwdmrbl 7y ago
Unfortunately it seems that something will need to change within society at large in order for these to be acceptable outside of the home.
- lallysingh 7y ago
  Outside of tech circles, does anyone care enough to remember? It was a fad for a week.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
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 dinner not being ready. I taught him he was allowed to set the table to keep himself occupied and help me get dinner ready faster. He wasn't required to set it. He was empowered to do so if he chose rather than being a pain in the butt for me.
- thedance 7y ago
  The point is that autistic people may not possess a theory of mind. They do not understand or anticipate the desires and intentions of others, and may not be aware that other people even have desires and intentions. You can't explain dinner to them if they are unable to comprehend that you intend to make it and that you desire the space and time to do so efficiently.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    Most likely, both my sons qualify as somewhere on the autism spectrum. They were never formally diagnosed and I used to routinely give advice to parents whose children did have a formal diagnosis when I was involved with an educational organization. Edit: I left out the critical part. I gave them advice and routinely said for the longest time "I don't have any ASD kids, but when my kid does that..." It happened so much, I began to wonder if maybe I did, actually, have ASD kids. (It was later somewhat confirmed by unofficial professional feedback.) My first website was a homeschooling blog. It grew out of the seeming popularity of my emails on a homeschooling list with a lot of parents of special-needs kids. I know quite a lot about autism and related issues. My oldest was such a pill, he was nicknamed demon child when he was little. He was an adolescent before he understood what I meant because I absolutely wasn't vilifying him, though he was hugely challenging to deal with. Humans aren't just born with social skills. There is a huge component of being raised right that I think is currently given short shrift by a society too quick to medicalize every parenting challenge, as if there weren't any socially awkward or shy kids before we had fancy labels for them.
HeavenBanned 7y ago
The implications of this are vast - what more could we accomplish with this kind of technology? I'm so excited to see what's on the horizon. Bravo.
abhisuri97 7y ago
Oh wow...google glass, that's something I haven't seen in a long time.
threatofrain 7y ago
Although it may be creepy from the perspective of privacy, for those who are okay with it, I imagine that children struggling with Theory of Mind performance might benefit from recording their everyday experiences, and then later having a trusted therapist offer guiding opinion. Google Glass seems to be amenable to something like that.
sergiomattei 7y ago
I want this and I want this now.
im3w1l 7y ago
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. Edited: Added second paragraph
- arketyp 7y ago
  I think everyone to some extent learns to hack some aspect or another of the social fabric by something close to simulating patterns which come more or less natural to another person. But there are introspective lessons in coming to terms with these obstacles in the first place that are maybe the things of truer value and which could be lost in artificial reward games.
  - mettamage 7y ago
    I thought about this at one point in my life. We don't get to experience the pain and suffering that medieval people or cavemen experienced. I think their pain and suffering was much more brutal than what most of us experience. I mean, the child mortality rate was a lot higher, people died younger and you couldn't fix ailments easily. I figured that it gives such people a mentality in which they are simply accepting live as it is, because you kind of have to by force (in a sense). I think the introspection from that would also be really valuable. But the issue here is: the price is too high. And I also think that's the case for the autistic group that has trouble with integrating themselves in society in the way they want to. Yes, resilience gained from introspection, for example, is amazing. But the cost might be to live with almost no close friends. Obviously, this is a sketched scenario and doesn't apply to everyone. But I can imagine that the cost is too high for quite a few people who have issues with social skills. Unfortunately, we still live in a time where we pay a fairly high cost for integrating into the social fabric of society when you're not able to do that by yourself.
- mettamage 7y ago
  > 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. I had a bad case of this, I did it a lot. Fortunately, some people made me aware of this tendency. Now a lot of those things I've learned are natural as if they've always been part of me. To be fair, there's 10 years in between both points.
ryanmarsh 7y ago
I could use this. Never been tested for Aspergers but could never flex that muscle everyone else seems to have where they can “read the room”. Wife swears I’m on the spectrum. This would save me from many future difficult situations.
yitchelle 7y ago
Cultural differences will be one of the difficulties for this idea to be successful. Eg, I know that some cultural, they smile when scared. You can see where this might lead to the wrong conclusion.
dr_dshiv 7y ago
Google glasses for the blind are now available for preorder. https://www.letsenvision.com/glasses https://www.letsenvision.com/glasses
thsealienbstrds 7y ago
On one hand, I really welcome technologies like this that empower people in a huge way. On the other hand, I really dread that in this case it comes from the company that wants to know everything about you. The example where Google hid a microphone in Nest makes me believe they will do anything to get more information from people. I think it's not beyond Google to use people's handicaps to improve the image of Google Glass. Sorry to put it like that...
thomasfl 7y ago
The idea is great. I guess i would prefer to use the glasses by Bosch instead, that looks like totally normal glasses and projects an image directly on to the retina. https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/products/optical-microsystems/smartglasses-light-drive/ https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/products/optical-microsystem...
joduplessis 7y ago
First thing that occurs to me is how easily this can be used/exploited by people with less than great intentions.
DanBC 7y ago
Alexithymia (this inability to recognise emotion in yourself or others) is common in autistic people, but it's neither sufficient nor required for the diagnosis. (It's not even part of the diagnosis). I mention this because autistic people often wait a long time for a diagnosis, and part of that is this idea that all autistic people are unable to recognise emotion. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924933818301779 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092493381...
ape4 7y ago
Seems funny that the symbol for a happy face is a happy face emoji.
kgarten 7y ago
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, mentioned it and got just strange looks: “This does not really solve any of the problems we are facing” It seems detecting facial emotions are not the main problems of the autistic children they are dealing with ... https://flutetheatre.co.uk/changing-lives-of-people-with-autism/ https://flutetheatre.co.uk/changing-lives-of-people-with-aut... Here’s work from a friend on the topic: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/grand-challenges/sites/grand-challenges/files/sensing-interpersonal-synchrony.pdf https://www.ucl.ac.uk/grand-challenges/sites/grand-challenge... The system itself can just help children with very mild symptoms. One colleague who works on wearable sensing for them mentioned that even head bands and wrist watches cannot be used as children commonly take them off and throw them around. Kelly also runs a fundraiser right now in case somebody wants to help out. In my personal opinion much more useful than the solution described in the ieee article: https://www.facebook.com/donate/574661226469627/10158203761499289/ https://www.facebook.com/donate/574661226469627/101582037614...
- Kaiyou 7y ago
  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,...
  - philliphaydon 7y ago
    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.
    - kgarten 7y ago
      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.
js8 7y ago
So instead of kids learning to recognize emotions on the human face, we will teach them to recognize symbols in the glasses that describe these emotions? And this will make them to interact with people better? I don't think this is progress.
nrthrn 7y ago
I have a son with Austism, and this is a very interesting project. But why? It is better to teach the reading of body language.
rubicks 7y ago
Autism is also a _sensory_ disorder. Speaking entirely for myself, I would find the additional stimuli distracting at best and unbearable at worst.
zepto 7y ago
Now we just need a version for neurotypical people to allow them to see the emotions of the autistic. See ‘double empathy problem’.
tathougies 7y ago
This is awful. Autistic kids don't need to change how they view emotions. Other people need to be more accepting that other people may not care about their emotions as much as they do.
- doinathing 7y ago
  If this works effectively I think it's a valuable choice to offer to autistic people - whether they choose to use it or not is totally valid of course. Often what people with disabilities are forced to do is choose an imperfect "accommodation", or choose to not participate in something at all, since it is not an option to instantly convert our society to a more compassionate, understanding, and fair place. I agree with you that the real thing here is that we should accept all people regardless of how they view/prioritize our emotions and meet each other where we all are. But until we are all in that same agreement, I'm all for tools that provide increased agency/information to people who want to use those tools.
Nasrudith 7y ago
I wonder about the opposite application - using it to read autistic emotional signs. Outbursts have ample build up and signs but they aren't noticed or are misread. Because autistic tells aren't neccessarily the same. I liken the situation to trying to treat a cat like a dog and then wondering why they claw you after wagging its tail - in cats that doesn't mean "happy" it means "back off!". Communication is fundamentally a two way street.
TheEndless3 7y ago
Sounds great on paper but I highly disagree with the universality of emotions and their represented facial clues. How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Barrett goes into great lengths about this. I think taking this technology into a categorization of emotions is faulty at best and dangerous at worst.
freekengeeker 7y ago
I've wanted something exactly like this, i can read emotions when iam putting close effort into the activity however it's exhausting to do so, reducing the mental toll on myself and other in social interaction is appreciated. Less meltdowns and misunderstandings would a upgrade. while it sounds too good to be true at this moment i worry that the black box that tells the user the emotion gives no feedback to why it did so, transparently to the user to make a good judgement is essential. this becomes the heading aid to the autistic it will be same problem the hearing impaired deal with then people find issue with the different.
miedpo 7y ago
This is pretty cool. I didn't really get to do this sorta thing with a speech therapist until I was in middle school. I think it'd be pretty good for young children. One small worry... I wouldn't want the child to get overdependent on the device. Perhaps it would be good if they only wear it for a certain portion of the day? Not sure.

266 points by sohkamyung 7y ago

Some good info written in annoying marketing press release style. Would be good to get this as a phone app with a headmounted camera, since that's far cheaper than Google Glass + doctor's prescription.

jasonlotito 7y ago
> The glasses are not meant to be a permanent prosthesis. The kids do 20-minute sessions a few times a week in their own homes, and the entire intervention currently lasts for six weeks. Children are expected to quickly learn how to detect the emotions of their social partners and then, after they’ve gained social confidence, stop using the glasses.

skissane 7y ago

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 other psychiatric/neurodevelopmental disorders, despite the fact that all these disorders have lots of overlap and rather fuzzily defined boundaries. None of the symptoms of ASD are unique to ASD; they all occur in other conditions also; given that all treatments for ASD are treating symptoms rather than the unknown underlying causes, any therapy for any ASD symptom is very likely to also work for other disorders in which the same symptom is expressed.) [1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Da_Fonseca/publication/23134164_Emotion_Understanding_in_Children_with_ADHD/links/542a51de0cf27e39fa8e7dc2.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Da_Fonseca/public... [2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christopher_Monk2/publication/7573340_Emotion_Recognition_Deficits_in_Pediatric_Anxiety_Disorders_Implications_for_Amygdala_Research/links/57c0a3f908aeb95224d4a508/Emotion-Recognition-Deficits-in-Pediatric-Anxiety-Disorders-Implications-for-Amygdala-Research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christopher_Monk2/publi... [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006322300008477 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...

SilasX 7y ago
Yeah, that was my initial reaction (though without your knowledge of the topic): there are a lot of people who could benefit from this, not just those with autism.
timwaagh 7y ago
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.
- chiyuri 7y ago
  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.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    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-categorising-mental-disorders.html 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/1232787807363461120 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).

tines 7y ago

I imagine that there are nuances to facial expression that might be difficult to extract from an image or video, depending on the parameters to your ML model. For example, if someone looks into my eyes, furrows their brows, and shakes their head slowly back and forth, this could mean that they are intensely sympathetic with me (when I am talking), or it could mean that they are disgusted with what I have said (when I have stopped talking), or many other things. If you add sound input to your model then maybe it can figure out how to incorporate that dimension into its results. Very cool though. Maybe you could have something like this to help colorblind people see colors, deaf people see sounds, the possibilities are exciting.

goodside 7y ago
I assume there are potential users who can’t easily perceive furrowing of brows, but who could infer its context-dependent meaning if it were made more obvious when it’s happening.

pishpash 7y ago

Is this a claim that computers are better at emotions than some humans? Something does not sit well.

carlinmack 7y ago
this robot can walk better than a disabled human in a wheelchair? something does not sit well.
- inportb 7y ago
  The robot does not sit well.
trevyn 7y ago
Identifying emotions, yes.
ksk 7y ago
Seems like its a soft push for creepy ad-tech from Google. Google will happily mine this data and eventually roll it into their ad business, while claiming its "anonymized".
seanhunter 7y ago
"Autism" is a term that is used to denote a complex set of neurological stuff, but one common theme is that autistic people have difficulty making sense of the deluge of sensory input. I could see how something which helps to simplify this could be helpful for some autistic people. So yes. Wouldn't work for everyone- My brother was severely autistic and he would have just smashed the glasses.

briefcomment 7y ago

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

saagarjha 7y ago
Emoji faces look identical while people differ in their facial expressions and how they choose to show them.
- briefcomment 7y ago
  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.

hrdwdmrbl 7y ago

Unfortunately it seems that something will need to change within society at large in order for these to be acceptable outside of the home.

lallysingh 7y ago
Outside of tech circles, does anyone care enough to remember? It was a fad for a week.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

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 dinner not being ready. I taught him he was allowed to set the table to keep himself occupied and help me get dinner ready faster. He wasn't required to set it. He was empowered to do so if he chose rather than being a pain in the butt for me.

thedance 7y ago
The point is that autistic people may not possess a theory of mind. They do not understand or anticipate the desires and intentions of others, and may not be aware that other people even have desires and intentions. You can't explain dinner to them if they are unable to comprehend that you intend to make it and that you desire the space and time to do so efficiently.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Most likely, both my sons qualify as somewhere on the autism spectrum. They were never formally diagnosed and I used to routinely give advice to parents whose children did have a formal diagnosis when I was involved with an educational organization. Edit: I left out the critical part. I gave them advice and routinely said for the longest time "I don't have any ASD kids, but when my kid does that..." It happened so much, I began to wonder if maybe I did, actually, have ASD kids. (It was later somewhat confirmed by unofficial professional feedback.) My first website was a homeschooling blog. It grew out of the seeming popularity of my emails on a homeschooling list with a lot of parents of special-needs kids. I know quite a lot about autism and related issues. My oldest was such a pill, he was nicknamed demon child when he was little. He was an adolescent before he understood what I meant because I absolutely wasn't vilifying him, though he was hugely challenging to deal with. Humans aren't just born with social skills. There is a huge component of being raised right that I think is currently given short shrift by a society too quick to medicalize every parenting challenge, as if there weren't any socially awkward or shy kids before we had fancy labels for them.

HeavenBanned 7y ago

The implications of this are vast - what more could we accomplish with this kind of technology? I'm so excited to see what's on the horizon. Bravo.

abhisuri97 7y ago

Oh wow...google glass, that's something I haven't seen in a long time.

threatofrain 7y ago

Although it may be creepy from the perspective of privacy, for those who are okay with it, I imagine that children struggling with Theory of Mind performance might benefit from recording their everyday experiences, and then later having a trusted therapist offer guiding opinion. Google Glass seems to be amenable to something like that.

sergiomattei 7y ago

I want this and I want this now.

im3w1l 7y ago

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. Edited: Added second paragraph

arketyp 7y ago
I think everyone to some extent learns to hack some aspect or another of the social fabric by something close to simulating patterns which come more or less natural to another person. But there are introspective lessons in coming to terms with these obstacles in the first place that are maybe the things of truer value and which could be lost in artificial reward games.
- mettamage 7y ago
  I thought about this at one point in my life. We don't get to experience the pain and suffering that medieval people or cavemen experienced. I think their pain and suffering was much more brutal than what most of us experience. I mean, the child mortality rate was a lot higher, people died younger and you couldn't fix ailments easily. I figured that it gives such people a mentality in which they are simply accepting live as it is, because you kind of have to by force (in a sense). I think the introspection from that would also be really valuable. But the issue here is: the price is too high. And I also think that's the case for the autistic group that has trouble with integrating themselves in society in the way they want to. Yes, resilience gained from introspection, for example, is amazing. But the cost might be to live with almost no close friends. Obviously, this is a sketched scenario and doesn't apply to everyone. But I can imagine that the cost is too high for quite a few people who have issues with social skills. Unfortunately, we still live in a time where we pay a fairly high cost for integrating into the social fabric of society when you're not able to do that by yourself.
mettamage 7y ago
> 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. I had a bad case of this, I did it a lot. Fortunately, some people made me aware of this tendency. Now a lot of those things I've learned are natural as if they've always been part of me. To be fair, there's 10 years in between both points.

ryanmarsh 7y ago

I could use this. Never been tested for Aspergers but could never flex that muscle everyone else seems to have where they can “read the room”. Wife swears I’m on the spectrum. This would save me from many future difficult situations.

yitchelle 7y ago

Cultural differences will be one of the difficulties for this idea to be successful. Eg, I know that some cultural, they smile when scared. You can see where this might lead to the wrong conclusion.

dr_dshiv 7y ago

Google glasses for the blind are now available for preorder. https://www.letsenvision.com/glasses https://www.letsenvision.com/glasses

thsealienbstrds 7y ago

On one hand, I really welcome technologies like this that empower people in a huge way. On the other hand, I really dread that in this case it comes from the company that wants to know everything about you. The example where Google hid a microphone in Nest makes me believe they will do anything to get more information from people. I think it's not beyond Google to use people's handicaps to improve the image of Google Glass. Sorry to put it like that...

thomasfl 7y ago

The idea is great. I guess i would prefer to use the glasses by Bosch instead, that looks like totally normal glasses and projects an image directly on to the retina. https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/products/optical-microsystems/smartglasses-light-drive/ https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/products/optical-microsystem...

joduplessis 7y ago

First thing that occurs to me is how easily this can be used/exploited by people with less than great intentions.

DanBC 7y ago

Alexithymia (this inability to recognise emotion in yourself or others) is common in autistic people, but it's neither sufficient nor required for the diagnosis. (It's not even part of the diagnosis). I mention this because autistic people often wait a long time for a diagnosis, and part of that is this idea that all autistic people are unable to recognise emotion. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924933818301779 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092493381...

ape4 7y ago

Seems funny that the symbol for a happy face is a happy face emoji.

kgarten 7y ago

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, mentioned it and got just strange looks: “This does not really solve any of the problems we are facing” It seems detecting facial emotions are not the main problems of the autistic children they are dealing with ... https://flutetheatre.co.uk/changing-lives-of-people-with-autism/ https://flutetheatre.co.uk/changing-lives-of-people-with-aut... Here’s work from a friend on the topic: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/grand-challenges/sites/grand-challenges/files/sensing-interpersonal-synchrony.pdf https://www.ucl.ac.uk/grand-challenges/sites/grand-challenge... The system itself can just help children with very mild symptoms. One colleague who works on wearable sensing for them mentioned that even head bands and wrist watches cannot be used as children commonly take them off and throw them around. Kelly also runs a fundraiser right now in case somebody wants to help out. In my personal opinion much more useful than the solution described in the ieee article: https://www.facebook.com/donate/574661226469627/10158203761499289/ https://www.facebook.com/donate/574661226469627/101582037614...

Kaiyou 7y ago
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,...
- philliphaydon 7y ago
  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.
  - kgarten 7y ago
    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.

js8 7y ago

So instead of kids learning to recognize emotions on the human face, we will teach them to recognize symbols in the glasses that describe these emotions? And this will make them to interact with people better? I don't think this is progress.

nrthrn 7y ago

I have a son with Austism, and this is a very interesting project. But why? It is better to teach the reading of body language.

rubicks 7y ago

Autism is also a _sensory_ disorder. Speaking entirely for myself, I would find the additional stimuli distracting at best and unbearable at worst.

zepto 7y ago

Now we just need a version for neurotypical people to allow them to see the emotions of the autistic. See ‘double empathy problem’.

tathougies 7y ago

This is awful. Autistic kids don't need to change how they view emotions. Other people need to be more accepting that other people may not care about their emotions as much as they do.

doinathing 7y ago
If this works effectively I think it's a valuable choice to offer to autistic people - whether they choose to use it or not is totally valid of course. Often what people with disabilities are forced to do is choose an imperfect "accommodation", or choose to not participate in something at all, since it is not an option to instantly convert our society to a more compassionate, understanding, and fair place. I agree with you that the real thing here is that we should accept all people regardless of how they view/prioritize our emotions and meet each other where we all are. But until we are all in that same agreement, I'm all for tools that provide increased agency/information to people who want to use those tools.

Nasrudith 7y ago

I wonder about the opposite application - using it to read autistic emotional signs. Outbursts have ample build up and signs but they aren't noticed or are misread. Because autistic tells aren't neccessarily the same. I liken the situation to trying to treat a cat like a dog and then wondering why they claw you after wagging its tail - in cats that doesn't mean "happy" it means "back off!". Communication is fundamentally a two way street.

TheEndless3 7y ago

Sounds great on paper but I highly disagree with the universality of emotions and their represented facial clues. How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Barrett goes into great lengths about this. I think taking this technology into a categorization of emotions is faulty at best and dangerous at worst.

freekengeeker 7y ago

I've wanted something exactly like this, i can read emotions when iam putting close effort into the activity however it's exhausting to do so, reducing the mental toll on myself and other in social interaction is appreciated. Less meltdowns and misunderstandings would a upgrade. while it sounds too good to be true at this moment i worry that the black box that tells the user the emotion gives no feedback to why it did so, transparently to the user to make a good judgement is essential. this becomes the heading aid to the autistic it will be same problem the hearing impaired deal with then people find issue with the different.

miedpo 7y ago

This is pretty cool. I didn't really get to do this sorta thing with a speech therapist until I was in middle school. I think it'd be pretty good for young children. One small worry... I wouldn't want the child to get overdependent on the device. Perhaps it would be good if they only wear it for a certain portion of the day? Not sure.