Autism Screening Using an Intelligent Toy Car

摘要

The number of cases reported with Autism Spectrum disorder (ASD), as a developmental disorder, has increased sharply in recent decades. Early diagnosis of ASD in children is essential for proper treatment and intervention. The difficulties in early detection of autism encouraged the authors to design a novel intelligent toy car for autism screening. The toy car is equipped with an accelerometer, which records a subject's usage behavior in terms of accelerations in three dimensions. A set of features, consisting of forty-four movement characteristics, has been extracted which can be used to discriminate between children with autism and normal children. The intelligent toy car has been tested on 25 children with autism and 25 normal children as the test and control groups respectively. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used to distinguish between the children with autism and other children. The system has 85% correct classification rate, 93% sensitivity and 76% specificity. The results are the same for boys and girls indicating the possible widespread use of this system among all children.