Emotion recognition for mobile devices with a potential use in serious games for autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

The continued improvement in the processing power of mobile devices, has enabled the deployment of complex processing and analysis in real time on personal devices. The prevalence of mobile devices, and the primary use as a gaming platform, provide an opportunity to create Serious Games based on complex image processing. This article focuses on the communication skills of children with autism, and develops a game using automated emotion recognition to assist in learning to interact in emotionally rich situations. This paper is an initial technology demonstration, which will lead, in future publications, to a full assessment of effect. The game uses automatic recognition of smiling to provide a scoring mechanism for player who collect facial expressions from people around them. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.