Ward, Jamie A; Richardson, Daniel C.; Orgs, Guido; Hunter, Kelly and Hamilton, Antonia. 2018. 'Sensing Interpersonal Synchrony between Actors and Autistic Children in Theatre Using Wrist-worn Accelerometers'. In: International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC). Singapore, Singapore 8-12 October 2018. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract or Description

We introduce a method of using wrist-worn accelerometers to measure non-verbal social coordination within a group that includes autistic children. Our goal was to record and chart the children’s social engagement – measured using interpersonal movement synchrony – as they took part in a theatrical work- shop that was specifically designed to enhance their social skills. Interpersonal synchrony, an important factor of social engagement that is known to be impaired in autism, is cal- culated using a cross-wavelet similarity comparison between participants’ movement data. We evaluate the feasibility of the approach over 3 live performances, each lasting 2 hours, using 6 actors and a total of 10 autistic children. We show that by visualising each child’s engagement over the course of a performance, it is possible to highlight subtle moments of social coordination that might otherwise be lost when review- ing video footage alone. This is important because it points the way to a new method for people who work with autistic children to be able to monitor the development of those in their care, and to adapt their therapeutic activities accordingly.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.1145/3267242.3267263
Keywords:	computer systems organization, embedded systems, redundancy, robotics, networks, network reliability, wearable sensing, accelerometers, theatre, autism, interpersonal synchrony, wavelets
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Psychology
Dates:	Date Event 8 October 2018 Published 7 June 2018 Accepted
Event Location:	Singapore, Singapore
Date range:	8-12 October 2018
Item ID:	24390
Date Deposited:	10 Oct 2018 09:43
Last Modified:	11 Jun 2021 19:16
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/24390

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