Smart Bracelet for Emotional Enhancement in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder †

Abstract

People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have great difficulties in social interaction and in the management of personal and other people’s emotions. This work aimed at developing an intelligent bracelet, capable of inferring the children’s emotional state, transmitting it to others, and, above all, informing the patients themselves so that they can learn to recognise, control, and work with, as well as to improve their self-knowledge and their relationship with their environment. Electrodermal activity (EDA) and photoplethysmography (PPG) are useful in combined psychophysiological and medical studies to determine the mood of patients. Due to COVID-19, no experiments with subjects could be carried out, although the modules were validated, and a public database was used to test the system’s application. The results concluded that, in general, when an individual is altered or becomes nervous, either positively or negatively (also known as valence) to a stimulus, their heart rate and sweating increase. This is the kind of relationship between physiological signals and external stimuli that the design of these circuits was intended to confirm. Finally, with the indicators of nervous system activity and knowing the behaviour of skin conductance in response to each basic emotion, it can be determined whether the subject is in a situation of pleasure or frustration in response to each reaction.