Developing emotion recognition training for autistic children

Autistic children find it difficult to process emotional information.

Studies have shown that emotion recognition training – where children learn to recognise different facial expressions – can improve autistic children’s social skills, wellbeing and ability to regulate their emotions.

Working with teachers, parents and autistic children and adults, we have designed a training package to help autistic children recognise and understand other people’s emotions.

Research has shown that the training package, named DAISEE (Digitally-Assisted Intervention for Supporting understanding of Emotional Expressions) is effective in improving autistic individuals’ recognition of facial emotions.

Project aims

Our eventual aim is for our DAISEE to become a product available to autistic children across the UK. In this project we will complete three steps needed for the training package to be ready to be tested in a large trial.

1. Establishing the technical requirements of our training package and conducting a market analysis

We will produce a document summarising what our training package must be able to do. We will gather this information by speaking to people in the settings where it may be used (schools, local education authorities, pupil referral units, alternative education provision, home schooling). We will also conduct a market analysis, identifying competing solutions and business model options, and speaking to potential commercial partners.

2. Creating a wireframe – a schematic of the structure and function – of the digital component of the package

Working with a commercial partner, we are creating a full wireframe prototype. We will work with key stakeholders (teachers, autistic individuals) to test and adapt this wireframe. The wireframe will be used to create a full software prototype using follow-up funding in the next phase of the project.

3. Creating a more diverse set of faces to use in our training

We will explore if we can use artificial intelligence (AI) to create a more diverse set of faces to use in our training. We will produce a set of faces that will include male and female adults and children from four ethnic groups (White European, African, Sub-Continental Asian, East Asian) displaying one of six emotions (disgust, happiness, anger, sadness, surprise, fear).

What we hope to achieve

Once this project is completed, our training package will be ready to be tested in a large trial. We hope that completing the project will allow us to obtain funding from the Medical Research Council (MRC) for this next stage of the research.