Project

Affective Social Quest

Groups

ASQ investigates ways to teach social-emotion skills to children interactively with toys. One of the first goals is to help autistic children recognize expressions of emotion in social situations. The system uses four "dwarfs" expressing sad, happy, surprise, and angry, and each communicates wirelessly to the system and detects which plush doll was selected by the child. The computer plays short entertaining video clips displaying examples of the four emotions and cues the child to pick a dwarf that closely matches that emotion. Future work includes improving the ability of the system to recognize direct displays of emotion by the child.