HCI Applications for aiding children with mental disorders

Abstract

This work is a part of an ongoing project that focuses on potential applications of HCI in aiding children with mental disorders. In this work we look at autism and bipolar disorder in particular. We believe HCI is promising here because it provides the possibility of capturing, analyzing, and influencing human perception and behavior. Treating mental disorders, particularly those discussed in this article, requires frequent individual sessions over long durations. An HCI assisted treatment allows for such personalized therapy and it can be expanded to allow for treatment in households that do not have ready access to such therapy. Children with autism are socially impaired and usually do not attend to the people around them. Recently, a new trend for utilizing HCI technology in the treatment of autism has emerged. So far it has mainly focused on diagnosing of autism [20] or practicing social skills like imitation [19]. However, we choose a different route that up to our knowledge has not yet been explored. We are interested in developing a mediating tool through which the world would seem more sensible to those with difficulty perceiving social cues. We suggest attention control for this purpose by eye tracking and augmented/manipulated reality techniques. Bipolar children suffer from abnormally strong mood swings. There has been no research reported in the literature for exploiting HCI in the treatment of bipolar disorder. We think there is much to be gain from HCI in this area as it provides tools for estimating one’s emotional state. These tools can be used for monitoring mood. Moreover, affective computing, an area of HCI which explores the influence of emotional agents on people, shows potential for influencing the moods of patients [16].