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Robotics and Autonomous Systems Lab
at Vanderbilt

VR System for Improving Social Skills in Teenagers with Autism

Personnel: Esube Bekele, Joshua Wade, Dayi Bian, Lian Zhang, Jing Fan

Outline:

We are designing a novel VR-based social task training system for teenagers with autism. The system will allow a participant to interact with virtual avatars in a social scene (e.g., a school cafeteria) to first identify deficits and then provide training to improve them. The system assesses real-time measurement of performance and cognitive data to provide individualized interaction.

Another project focusing on emotion recognition using virtual reality was featured on ABC News
and Ivanhoe News.

Publications:

  1. Bekele, E., Wade, J., Bian, D., Fan, J., Swanson, A., Warren, Z., & Sarkar, N. (2016, March). Multimodal adaptive social interaction in virtual environment (MASI-VR) for children with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In Virtual Reality (VR), 2016 IEEE (pp. 121-130). IEEE.
  2. Bekele, E., Wade, J. W., Bian, D., Zhang, L., Zheng, Z., Swanson, A., … & Sarkar, N. (2014, June). Multimodal Interfaces and Sensory Fusion in VR for Social Interactions. In International Conference on Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality (pp. 14-24). Springer International Publishing.
  3. Peterman, J. S., Bekele, E., Bian, D., Sarkar, N., & Park, S. (2015). Complexities of emotional responses to social and non-social affective stimuli in schizophrenia. Frontiers in psychology, 6.
  4. Bekele, E., Crittendon, J., Zheng, Z., Swanson, A., Weitlauf, A., Warren, Z., & Sarkar, N. (2014). Assessing the utility of a virtual environment for enhancing facial affect recognition in adolescents with autism. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 44(7), 1641-1650.
  5. Bekele, E., Bian, D., Zheng, Z., Peterman, J., Park, S., & Sarkar, N. (2014, June). Responses during facial emotional expression recognition tasks using virtual reality and static iaps pictures for adults with schizophrenia. In International Conference on Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality (pp. 225-235). Springer International Publishing.
  6. Bekele, E., Young, M., Zheng, Z., Zhang, L., Swanson, A., Johnston, R., … & Sarkar, N. (2013, July). A step towards adaptive multimodal virtual social interaction platform for children with autism. In International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 464-473). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
  7. Bekele, E., Zheng, Z., Swanson, A., Crittendon, J., Warren, Z., & Sarkar, N. (2013). Understanding how adolescents with autism respond to facial expressions in virtual reality environments. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 19(4), 711-720.