Titulo Estágio
Immersive virtual reality facial expression training
Áreas de especialidade
Sistemas Inteligentes
Engenharia de Software
Local do Estágio
CISUC-DEI e CIBIT-ICNAS
Enquadramento
Emotional facial expressions exist across all human cultures and have a pivotal role in social communication (Ekman, 2004). Despite the universality of emotional expression in humans, the way emotions are expressed varies between cultures and individuals. Particularly among individuals, the ability to inhibit, substitute, mask or magnify emotional facial expressions is very variable (Ekman, 2004). One of the particular cases in which this variability is visible is among individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
Integrating the social interaction and communication disabilities of this condition is an impairment in decoding others emotional facial expressions and in expressing one´s emotions through facial movements (DSM-V, APA, 2013). Although emotional decoding in ASD has been fairly well characterized being subject of intensive research, the same is not true for facial emotional expression. Particularly interesting is the suggestion that these two aspects of social communication are highly correlated (Ricciardi, 2017), and even can be codependent (White, 2018). Indeed, both recognition and production of emotional facial expressions are dependent of the internal representations of the physical components of each expression (Brewer, 2016).
Technology-based interventions can be particularly useful with ASD individuals, partially due to their high susceptibility to environment uncontrolled and unpredictable changes and to face-to-face social interactions. This type of interventions is currently a major topic in rehabilitation research and development and incorporates what are so called Serious Games approaches (ref). By using virtual setups and gamification techniques, such interventions are particularly efficient in engaging patients in treatment by retaining their interest and attention.
Moreover, taking advantage of a controlled environment, this approach allows the adaptation of stimuli´s output to patient’s specific deficits and tolerability, while increasing complexity in a fairly individual and personalized manner and providing real-time performance feedback
There is evidence that serious game interventions can improve facial expression emotion production is ASD children (Gordon, 2014). However, in parallel with the scarce research concerning characterization of facial emotion expression in ASD, there is also a lack of
knowledge on the tolerance and efficacy of facial emotional expression interventions either in terms of improvement of facial emotions production as in regards to their impact on clinical symptomatology (Brewer 2016).
Objetivo
The student is asked to build and evaluate an immersive virtual reality training game for decoding and conveying facial expressions. He/she will make use of the HTC Vive Pro Eye VR setup, with the newly released VIVE Facial Tracker to capture the facial positions of the users while using the headset
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
- State of the art analysis
- Technology familiarization
- Requirements analysis
- Initial prototyping
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
- Development of the serious game
- Testing with control participants
- Testing with ASD participants
- Analysis of the results
Condições
- Access to a multidisciplinary team, expert in ASD, and patient associations to conduct the tests
- Possibility of partial funding to the student depending on his/her curriculum vitae
Orientador
Marco António Machado Simões
msimoes@dei.uc.pt 📩