
Upgraded Google Glass helps autistic kids “see” emotions - sohkamyung
https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/upgraded-google-glass-helps-autistic-kids-see-emotions
======
im3w1l
I wonder what effect this will have on our culture long term. It would be
unfortunate if Glass' determination ends being seen as the ground truth.

I have noticed a certain phenomenon where people who are bad at something read
books about it to compensate, and then having read books on the subjects start
considering themselves experts on it and preach to others, closing the loop
from descriptive to prescriptive.

Edited: Added second paragraph

~~~
z3t4
Only a beginner can teach a beginner. First you struggle. Then you think you
know it all. Then you forget what was so hard. Then you master it. And then
you realize you know very little.

~~~
derefr
And yet, oddly, sometimes mastery confers the inability to teach something,
because most of what you now know, you never learned in association to a
structured explanation, only in association to your own trained reflexes.

People who learn a second language understand its grammar from the first
stroke, since it’s taught along with the language. People who learn a first
language _recognize_ its grammar (i.e. they can tell you whether or not
something is grammatical) but don’t _understand_ it, because they picked the
language up “naturally.”

Often a master will come to a sophomore student and ask _them_ to explain a
concept to the juniors (after checking their explanation for not having any
faults the master can find), because a usual master’s explanation (presuming
the master isn’t also a master of education) is far less _useful_ to a
junior’s understanding than a sophomore’s is. The master is aware of nuances
that greatly affect the end result, but aren’t so relevant at first; while the
sophomore is aware mostly of things in the order they’ve managed to absorb
them so far—which likely reflects the order of least-to-most difficult to
absorb, and so reflects the things the juniors would be most likely to be
struggling with.

~~~
wpietri
Is that odd?

I think of teaching something as a separate skill. As you say, teaching is
about helping a student where they are. Mastering topic X doesn't convey
knowledge of how students A, B, and C each relate to topic X.

------
skissane
It is worth noting that difficulties in recognising emotions in faces are by
no means unique to ASD; they also occur in ADHD [1], anxiety disorders [2],
schizophrenia [3], and probably other psychiatric/neurodevelopmental disorders
as well. So, if this technology has value, its value would be a lot broader
than only ASD.

(As an aside, a lot of people tend to have this narrow focus on just ASD to
the exclusion of other psychiatric/neurodevelopmental disorders, despite the
fact that all these disorders have lots of overlap and rather fuzzily defined
boundaries. None of the symptoms of ASD are unique to ASD; they all occur in
other conditions also; given that all treatments for ASD are treating symptoms
rather than the unknown underlying causes, any therapy for any ASD symptom is
very likely to also work for other disorders in which the same symptom is
expressed.)

[1]
[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Da_Fonseca/public...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Da_Fonseca/publication/23134164_Emotion_Understanding_in_Children_with_ADHD/links/542a51de0cf27e39fa8e7dc2.pdf)

[2]
[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christopher_Monk2/publi...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christopher_Monk2/publication/7573340_Emotion_Recognition_Deficits_in_Pediatric_Anxiety_Disorders_Implications_for_Amygdala_Research/links/57c0a3f908aeb95224d4a508/Emotion-
Recognition-Deficits-in-Pediatric-Anxiety-Disorders-Implications-for-Amygdala-
Research.pdf)

[3]
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006322300008477)

~~~
timwaagh
That makes good sense. ASD is a catch all term for those with certain symptoms
that are unexplained by other factors. Schizophrenia and anxiety disorders
would be some of those other factors. Not sure about ADHD.

~~~
chiyuri
There is substantial comorbidity with ASD and ADHD. ADHD occurs in ~4.4% of
the general population, but with ASD that goes up to ~45% (the margin of error
is massive on the latter)

Some of the symptoms of ADHD, like RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria), sound
very much like ASD traits rather than ADHD traits.

In the future I think we'll find a lot more underlying commonalities of all of
these conditions. OCD, GID (gender identity disorder), misophonia, tourettes
and more are also strikingly comorbid within ASD.

~~~
wpietri
There was a great Philosophy Bites podcast that talked about the high
comorbidity of mental disorders. This one, I think:
[https://philosophybites.com/2016/01/steven-hyman-on-
categori...](https://philosophybites.com/2016/01/steven-hyman-on-categorising-
mental-disorders.html)

The point that stuck with me is that, as you say, the high comorbidity is
strong evidence that we have a bad model of the situation. Part of that for me
is the medicalization of deviance.

As an example, I saw a bit on Twitter from an autism researcher who was
sitting in on a young girl getting tested for autism. She was shown an
animation of triangles moving around in a way that neurotypicals would
anthropomorphize:
[https://twitter.com/DrRubySapphire/status/123278780736346112...](https://twitter.com/DrRubySapphire/status/1232787807363461120)

She described how the triangles moved instead of humanizing them. She
recognized that they looked like they were playing, but knew that triangles
didn't have minds. That was marked as a failure, a sign of sickness. Not
because she was wrong, but because she was different from the norm.

I think a lot about the world where we just accept that there are a bunch of
different kinds of people and stop trying to fit them all into one mold. Where
we make the world work for all of them, not just the "normal" ones (which,
historically, seems to mean straight, white, moneyed, neurotypical men of a
particular body type).

------
kgarten
Such studies, papers and news always makes me cringe. It seems overly
engineered with limited usefulness.

Superpower glass … really?

As background I work in public research and have no background in Autism
research. Yet, due to a mutual friend, I was lucky to meet Kelly Hunter, and
attend one of her workshops (together with several other researchers working
on helping autistic children). I knew the Stanford project, mentioned it and
got just strange looks: “This does not really solve any of the problems we are
facing” It seems detecting facial emotions are not the main problems of the
autistic children they are dealing with ...

[https://flutetheatre.co.uk/changing-lives-of-people-with-
aut...](https://flutetheatre.co.uk/changing-lives-of-people-with-autism/)

Here’s work from a friend on the topic: [https://www.ucl.ac.uk/grand-
challenges/sites/grand-challenge...](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/grand-
challenges/sites/grand-challenges/files/sensing-interpersonal-synchrony.pdf)

The system itself can just help children with very mild symptoms. One
colleague who works on wearable sensing for them mentioned that even head
bands and wrist watches cannot be used as children commonly take them off and
throw them around.

Kelly also runs a fundraiser right now in case somebody wants to help out. In
my personal opinion much more useful than the solution described in the ieee
article:
[https://www.facebook.com/donate/574661226469627/101582037614...](https://www.facebook.com/donate/574661226469627/10158203761499289/)

~~~
Kaiyou
What's the point of knowing someone is angry if you do not know why he is
angry? Detecting emotions doesn't strike me as particularly useful.
Manipulating emotions of others on the other hand,...

~~~
philliphaydon
Knowing someone is angry allows you to act accordingly.

If you don't know someone is sad how do you console them?

There's a great comedy on Netflix called Atypical, one of the things the main
character deals with in this show is his inability to read peoples emotions.

~~~
Kaiyou
That you think a sad person needs consoling reveals your lack of understanding
of the problem. It wouldn't occur to an autistic person to console someone who
is sad. The ability to read emotion isn't useful on its own. You also need to
know how to react to this emotion. Knowing someone is angry won't help you if
you have no idea how to defuse this anger. Social interactions do not make
sense for autistic people and need to be learned like a foreign language. It's
like writing a computer program. You have to be very precise when telling a
computer what to do and the same goes for autistic people. You can't just tell
them someone is angry and expect them to know what to do. Or when someone is
sad, even if you tell them that they have to console such a person, they'd
have no idea what consoling even is and how to do it.

------
DoreenMichele
It sounds to me like you could do a lot more to just educate the parents.

You don't get mad and shout at a young child who has decided to put the
silverware away. You talk to them about the process of making and serving
dinner. He could have been shown that one way to make the silverware more
orderly is set the table for everyone while Mom cooks.

That was my response to my then five year old being impatient with dinner not
being ready. I taught him he was allowed to set the table to keep himself
occupied and help me get dinner ready faster.

He wasn't required to set it. He was empowered to do so if he chose rather
than being a pain in the butt for me.

~~~
thedance
The point is that autistic people may not possess a theory of mind. They do
not understand or anticipate the desires and intentions of others, and may not
be aware that other people even have desires and intentions. You can't explain
dinner to them if they are unable to comprehend that you intend to make it and
that you desire the space and time to do so efficiently.

~~~
simonskoog
After having interacted with a person with autism daily for a few years (and
parts of their social groups which include others with autism) I wonder if
there's any truth to that at all.

It almost seems as the opposite was true where telling of intention and desire
is _extremely accurate_, to a scary degree, if it's interpreted through text
or speech. But where body language and weird social norms/white lies that are
important social queues for me go completely unnoticed.

If people not on the spectrum actually understand others intentions and
desires more, and not just have the ability to read it from social queues
people on the spectrum don't pick up, what does that say about so many people
acting in selfish and mean ways if it benefits them?

~~~
DoreenMichele
I'm absolutely not aspie. I sometimes get accused of being such. It's always
because I'm saying "The emperor has no clothes!" and people don't like it and
want to shut me up and pretend I have no social skills whatsoever (to try to
create plausible deniability for their crap).

I spent a lot of time in therapy. I've learned to keep more quiet about things
that seem obvious to me because I do at times miss the fact that what is
obvious to me is something someone else thinks they are very cleverly hiding
or some crap. Like anyone, I have something of a tendency to assume that what
is obvious to me is obvious to others.

An awful lot of so-called social skill appears to be knowing what polite lies
you are supposed to collude with to make the people around you comfortable.
This is actually the root cause of the persistence of a lot of social ills.

If you can't tell someone "Yeah, that's racist/classist/sexist baloney, give
me a break" because that's too rude to tolerate, don't be all shocked when the
world is overrun with racism, classism, sexism, etc.

Abusive people also count on normalizing their ugly behaviors and on people
around them not saying "No, dude, that's not funny at all. Stop that." We have
movie scenes where some child is hiding from a visiting aunt and her icky
slobbery kisses and tendency to pinch his cheeks hard and the parents giggle
about the behavior of the child rather than tell the aunt "Bitch, keep your
hands to yourself. No, you don't have a right to do this to my child. They
don't like it, so don't do it."

And then we are all mystified at how to stop child molesters. But you can't
tell people "Um, yeah. You are actively colluding with child molesters when
you do stuff like that."

Because that would be rude. Or something.

------
thsealienbstrds
On one hand, I really welcome technologies like this that empower people in a
huge way. On the other hand, I really dread that in this case it comes from
the company that wants to know everything about you.

The example where Google hid a microphone in Nest makes me believe they will
do anything to get more information from people. I think it's not beyond
Google to use people's handicaps to improve the image of Google Glass. Sorry
to put it like that...

------
DanBC
Alexithymia (this inability to recognise emotion in yourself or others) is
common in autistic people, but it's neither sufficient nor required for the
diagnosis. (It's not even part of the diagnosis).

I mention this because autistic people often wait a long time for a diagnosis,
and part of that is this idea that all autistic people are unable to recognise
emotion.

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092493381...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924933818301779)

------
tines
I imagine that there are nuances to facial expression that might be difficult
to extract from an image or video, depending on the parameters to your ML
model.

For example, if someone looks into my eyes, furrows their brows, and shakes
their head slowly back and forth, this could mean that they are intensely
sympathetic with me (when I am talking), or it could mean that they are
disgusted with what I have said (when I have stopped talking), or many other
things. If you add sound input to your model then maybe it can figure out how
to incorporate that dimension into its results.

Very cool though. Maybe you could have something like this to help colorblind
people see colors, deaf people see sounds, the possibilities are exciting.

~~~
goodside
I assume there are potential users who can’t easily perceive furrowing of
brows, but who could infer its context-dependent meaning if it were made more
obvious when it’s happening.

------
freekengeeker
I've wanted something exactly like this, i can read emotions when iam putting
close effort into the activity however it's exhausting to do so, reducing the
mental toll on myself and other in social interaction is appreciated. Less
meltdowns and misunderstandings would a upgrade. while it sounds too good to
be true at this moment i worry that the black box that tells the user the
emotion gives no feedback to why it did so, transparently to the user to make
a good judgement is essential. this becomes the heading aid to the autistic it
will be same problem the hearing impaired deal with then people find issue
with the different.

------
thomasfl
The idea is great. I guess i would prefer to use the glasses by Bosch instead,
that looks like totally normal glasses and projects an image directly on to
the retina. [https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/products/optical-
microsystem...](https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/products/optical-
microsystems/smartglasses-light-drive/)

------
threatofrain
Although it may be creepy from the perspective of privacy, for those who are
okay with it, I imagine that children struggling with Theory of Mind
performance might benefit from recording their everyday experiences, and then
later having a trusted therapist offer guiding opinion. Google Glass seems to
be amenable to something like that.

------
TheEndless3
Sounds great on paper but I highly disagree with the universality of emotions
and their represented facial clues. How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Barrett goes
into great lengths about this. I think taking this technology into a
categorization of emotions is faulty at best and dangerous at worst.

------
ryanmarsh
I could use this. Never been tested for Aspergers but could never flex that
muscle everyone else seems to have where they can “read the room”. Wife swears
I’m on the spectrum. This would save me from many future difficult situations.

------
gowld
Some good info written in annoying marketing press release style. Would be
good to get this as a phone app with a headmounted camera, since that's far
cheaper than Google Glass + doctor's prescription.

~~~
jasonlotito
> The glasses are not meant to be a permanent prosthesis. The kids do
> 20-minute sessions a few times a week in their own homes, and the entire
> intervention currently lasts for six weeks. Children are expected to quickly
> learn how to detect the emotions of their social partners and then, after
> they’ve gained social confidence, stop using the glasses.

------
yitchelle
Cultural differences will be one of the difficulties for this idea to be
successful. Eg, I know that some cultural, they smile when scared. You can see
where this might lead to the wrong conclusion.

------
tathougies
This is awful. Autistic kids don't need to change how they view emotions.
Other people need to be more accepting that other people may not care about
their emotions as much as they do.

~~~
doinathing
If this works effectively I think it's a valuable choice to offer to autistic
people - whether they choose to use it or not is totally valid of course.
Often what people with disabilities are forced to do is choose an imperfect
"accommodation", or choose to not participate in something at all, since it is
not an option to instantly convert our society to a more compassionate,
understanding, and fair place.

I agree with you that the real thing here is that we should accept all people
regardless of how they view/prioritize our emotions and meet each other where
we all are. But until we are all in that same agreement, I'm all for tools
that provide increased agency/information to people who want to use those
tools.

------
Nasrudith
I wonder about the opposite application - using it to read autistic emotional
signs. Outbursts have ample build up and signs but they aren't noticed or are
misread. Because autistic tells aren't neccessarily the same. I liken the
situation to trying to treat a cat like a dog and then wondering why they claw
you after wagging its tail - in cats that doesn't mean "happy" it means "back
off!". Communication is fundamentally a two way street.

------
dr_dshiv
Google glasses for the blind are now available for preorder.

[https://www.letsenvision.com/glasses](https://www.letsenvision.com/glasses)

------
miedpo
This is pretty cool. I didn't really get to do this sorta thing with a speech
therapist until I was in middle school. I think it'd be pretty good for young
children.

One small worry... I wouldn't want the child to get overdependent on the
device. Perhaps it would be good if they only wear it for a certain portion of
the day? Not sure.

------
nrthrn
I have a son with Austism, and this is a very interesting project. But why? It
is better to teach the reading of body language.

------
briefcomment
Interesting that emojis of faces can be identified but not actual faces. Is
this because the emoji is just much simpler to process?

~~~
saagarjha
Emoji faces look identical while people differ in their facial expressions and
how they choose to show them.

~~~
briefcomment
Sure, but you would think that after seeing your parents' expressions for
year's you would start to recognize them eventually too. I'm wondering what
makes symbols that much easier to understand.

------
joduplessis
First thing that occurs to me is how easily this can be used/exploited by
people with less than great intentions.

------
zepto
Now we just need a version for neurotypical people to allow them to see the
emotions of the autistic.

See ‘double empathy problem’.

------
js8
So instead of kids learning to recognize emotions on the human face, we will
teach them to recognize symbols in the glasses that describe these emotions?
And this will make them to interact with people better? I don't think this is
progress.

------
ape4
Seems funny that the symbol for a happy face is a happy face emoji.

------
rubicks
Autism is also a _sensory_ disorder. Speaking entirely for myself, I would
find the additional stimuli distracting at best and unbearable at worst.

------
abhisuri97
Oh wow...google glass, that's something I haven't seen in a long time.

------
HeavenBanned
The implications of this are vast - what more could we accomplish with this
kind of technology? I'm so excited to see what's on the horizon. Bravo.

------
hrdwdmrbl
Unfortunately it seems that something will need to change within society at
large in order for these to be acceptable outside of the home.

~~~
lallysingh
Outside of tech circles, does anyone care enough to remember? It was a fad for
a week.

------
sergiomattei
I want this and I want this now.

------
pishpash
Is this a claim that computers are better at emotions than some humans?
Something does not sit well.

~~~
carlinmack
this robot can walk better than a disabled human in a wheelchair? something
does not sit well.

~~~
inportb
The robot does not sit well.

