HCI as a way to quantify Autism in infants ? Part I.

HCI stands for Human-Computer Interaction and is the computer science field devoted to enable a better connection between computers and humans. David Knossow at INRIA just released his PhD thesis to the TEL server. It is in French but his thesis summary reads:

Markerless Human Motion Capture with Multiple Cameras My Ph.D manuscript deals with the problem of markerless human motion capture. We propose an approach that relies on the use of multiple cameras and that avoids most of the constraints on the environment and the use of markers to perform the motion capture, as it is generally the case for industrial systems. The absence of markers makes harder the problem of extracting relevant information from images but also to correlate this information between. Moreover, interpreting this extracted information in terms of joint parameters motion is not an easy task. We propose an approach that relies on occluding contours of the human body. We studied the link between motion parameters and the apparent motion of the edges in images. Minimizing the error between the extracted edges and the projection of the 3D model onto the images allows to estimate the motion parameters of the actor. Among the opened issues, we show that using video based motion capture allows to provide additional hints such as contacts between body parts or between the actor and its environment. This information is particularly relevant for improving character animation.

While the initial interest is in capturing human motion at low cost (as opposed to current systems which cost up to $400,000), I believe this is the beginning of technology development that is central to the study and detection of autism in infants (3-6 months old). The current state of the affairs with regards to Autism detection is that one waits until speech is shown to be very late (about 2 year old) to begin diagnosing the disease even though it has been shown that the brain growth has been abnormal from 0 to 2 as shown by Eric Courchesne. With the advent of the digital world, home movies are beginning to be records of the state of knowledge on the condition of people. Some studies have shown at the same time that home movies could be used to figure out very early that something is not right (search Pub Med with the keywords: Autism movies). For instance, in

"Early recognition of 1-year-old infants with autism spectrum disorder versus mental retardation" by Osterling JA,Dawson G,Munson JA (Dev Psychopathol. 2002 Spring;14(2):239-51.), one can read the following:

Results indicated that 1-year-olds with autism spectrum disorder can be distinguished from 1-year-olds with typical development and those with mental retardation. The infants with autism spectrum disorder looked at others and oriented to their names less frequently than infants with mental retardation. The infants with autism spectrum disorder and those with mental retardation used gestures and looked to objects held by others less frequently and engaged in repetitive motor actions more frequently than typically developing infants.