Ward, JA;
Richardson, D;
Orgs, G;
Hunter, K;
Hamilton, A;
(2018)
Sensing interpersonal synchrony between actors and autistic children in theatre using wrist-worn accelerometers.
In: Kunze, Kai and Balan, Rajesh K and Lee, Youngki, (eds.)
Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC '18).
(pp. pp. 148-155).
ACM (Association for Computing Machinery): New York, NY, USA.
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Abstract
We introduce a method of using wrist-worn accelerometers to measure non-verbal social coordination within a group that includes autistic children. Our goal was to record and chart the children's social engagement - measured using interpersonal movement synchrony - as they took part in a theatrical workshop that was specifically designed to enhance their social skills. Interpersonal synchrony, an important factor of social engagement that is known to be impaired in autism, is calculated using a cross-wavelet similarity comparison between participants' movement data. We evaluate the feasibility of the approach over 3 live performances, each lasting 2 hours, using 6 actors and a total of 10 autistic children. We show that by visualising each child's engagement over the course of a performance, it is possible to highlight subtle moments of social coordination that might otherwise be lost when reviewing video footage alone. This is important because it points the way to a new method for people who work with autistic children to be able to monitor the development of those in their care, and to adapt their therapeutic activities accordingly.
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