Social Skills

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  website in action!

What is it?

This website is intended to be an interactive and fun way for children and adults to practice recognizing facial expressions. At least one study found that computer based treatment can significantly help children with high-functioning autism (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10803-015-2374-0).

Why is it important?

People with autism sometimes have difficulties recognizing facial expressions. Misinterpretations in facial expression could lead someone to experience social difficulties. One study found that much of the difficulty came when distinguishing emotional from neutral faces. In the study adults with autism were significantly more likely to misinterpret happy faces as neutral than neurotypical individuals (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1362361314520755). As someone who has experience in the field of ABA therapy I feel something like this could replace boring worksheets. It does not require expensive hardware or software- if a therapist, parent, or client themselves want to use it they can! My biggest hope is that someone will come across this project and be inspired to create other interactive methods of learning for ABA therapy.

How I built it

The main component of the project is Microsoft's Emotion API. I wrote the important bits in JavaScript and the pretty stuff in HTML & CSS.

Challenges I ran into

Getting the webcam to work was the hardest part. Luckily I found webcamjs and it had some pretty good documentation and demos.

What's next for Social Skills

I want to make Social Skills more like a game that rewards the player. With rewards built in it would be easier for ABA therapists to include it as part of a token system.

Built With

• css
• html5
• javascript