Background- Recent projects for Autism Spectrum Disordered Children

As we mentioned in the earlier article Autism is a major problem nowadays. But if we diagnose this disorder in its earlier stage and if we do proper treatments and training on them, then we can cure this disorder before it gets increased.

In order to that case, many kinds of researches have been done to find solutions with the combination of Technology and Bio-medicine. Those systems aid ASD children in many aspects to enhance their quality of life. In this article, we are going to talk about some brief descriptions of the existing systems that have been developed to improve ASD child's impairments.

L.G Pillai, E.Sherly. A Deep Learning-Based Evaluation of Articulation Disorder and Learning  Assistive System for autistic children. Presented at the International Journal on  Natural Language Computing.

[Online]. Available: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320926515_A_Deep_Learning_Based_Evaluation_of_Articulation_Disorder_and_Learning_Assistive_System_for_Autistic_Children.  

• The implementation of this work is accomplished through two different stages. In the first stage, they attempted to develop an Automatic Speech Recognition system, to identify the articulation disorder in children with Aspergers’ Syndrome (AS) on the basis of 14 Malayalam vowels. In the second stage, Learning Assistive System for Autistic Child (LASAC)is envisioned to provide speech training as well as impaired speech analysis for Malayalam vowels. A feature vector is used to create the acoustic model and the Euclidean Distance formula is used to analyze the percentage of impairment in AS student’s speech by comparing their speech features against the acoustic model.LASAC provides an interactive interface that offers speech training, speech analysis, and articulation tutorial.

M.Sharda, T.P.Subhadra, S.Sahay, C.Nagaraja, L.Singh, R.Mishra, A.Sen, N.Singhal, D.Erickson, N.C.Singh.Sounds of melody-Pitch patterns of speech in autism. Presented at Neuroscience Letters journal.

[Online].Available:https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44577909_Sounds_of_melody-Pitch_patterns_of_speech_in_autism

• In this research, their objective was to find a pattern in the vocalizations of children with ASD. They have compared the intonational features (pitch patterns of a sentence) of 15 children with ASD,  who speaks, in the 4-10 age group. They have observed exaggerated pitch, pitch range, pitch excursion, and pitch contours in the speech of children with ASD using acoustic measurements.

A.Wojciechowski, R.A.Musawi. Assistive technology application for enhancing social and language skills of young children with autism. Presented at Multimedia Tools and Applications journal.

[Online]. Available: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11042-016-3995-9

• In there, they have proposed an assistive technology application that is designed for supporting the young children affected by ASD, in their process of learning the pronunciation and meaning of new words. The system was built-up using of a mobile application and object identifiers (Estimate Beacon sensors). The system requires active participation like a parent of the child to select words, record pronunciation of object names, and to activate and turn off the application.

M.Z.A.Aziz, S.A.C.Abdullah, S.F.S.Adnan, L.Mazalan. Educational app for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). Presented at Procedia Computer Science journal.

[Online].Available:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050914014732

• In there they have developed an application for iOS devices to focus on giving a solution to verbal communication problems. The application will give a new alternative that allows the children to select and choose what they need or what they want to say. And thus avoiding any unwanted miscommunication. Using this application, children with ASD can follow the process of learning by listening to the audio sound after interacting with the picture of the object.

Oller at the LENA Foundation. Researchers seek patterns in the sounds of autism.

[Online]. Available: https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/researchers-seek-patterns-in-the-sounds-of-autism/

• Here they have been used a potential recording device and software algorithm to measure the number and characteristics of sounds emitted from different age groups of children with autism. This research shows that infants make precursors to speech, such as squeals, growls and vowel-like sounds and this study has shown a pattern. These patterns which are not easily detected by the human ear, and require massive computing power to calculate are distinct in children with ASD.

So these are some of the existing researches that have been done on behalf of ASD child's communication problems. So in our project, we proposed to develop a Verbal therapeutic desktop application for Autism disordered children, based on these researches as well as the other related researches.