Tanaka Hiroki, Negoro Hideki, Iwasaka Hidemi, Nakamura Satoshi
Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Ikoma-shi, Nara, 630-0101, Japan.
Center for Special Needs Education, Nara University of Education, Nara-shi, Nara, 630-8538, Japan.
PLoS One. 2017 Aug 10;12(8):e0182151. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0182151. eCollection 2017.
Social skills training, performed by human trainers, is a well-established method for obtaining appropriate skills in social interaction. Previous work automated the process of social skills training by developing a dialogue system that teaches social communication skills through interaction with a computer avatar. Even though previous work that simulated social skills training only considered acoustic and linguistic information, human social skills trainers take into account visual and other non-verbal features. In this paper, we create and evaluate a social skills training system that closes this gap by considering the audiovisual features of the smiling ratio and the head pose (yaw and pitch). In addition, the previous system was only tested with graduate students; in this paper, we applied our system to children or young adults with autism spectrum disorders. For our experimental evaluation, we recruited 18 members from the general population and 10 people with autism spectrum disorders and gave them our proposed multimodal system to use. An experienced human social skills trainer rated the social skills of the users. We evaluated the system's effectiveness by comparing pre- and post-training scores and identified significant improvement in their social skills using our proposed multimodal system. Computer-based social skills training is useful for people who experience social difficulties. Such a system can be used by teachers, therapists, and social skills trainers for rehabilitation and the supplemental use of human-based training anywhere and anytime.
由人类培训师进行的社交技能训练是一种公认的获取社交互动中适当技能的方法。先前的工作通过开发一种对话系统实现了社交技能训练过程的自动化,该系统通过与计算机虚拟形象互动来教授社交沟通技能。尽管先前模拟社交技能训练的工作仅考虑了声学和语言信息,但人类社交技能培训师会考虑视觉和其他非语言特征。在本文中,我们创建并评估了一个社交技能训练系统,该系统通过考虑微笑比例和头部姿势(偏航和俯仰)的视听特征来弥补这一差距。此外,先前的系统仅在研究生中进行了测试;在本文中,我们将我们的系统应用于患有自闭症谱系障碍的儿童或年轻人。对于我们的实验评估,我们从普通人群中招募了18名成员和10名患有自闭症谱系障碍的人,并让他们使用我们提出的多模态系统。一位经验丰富的人类社交技能培训师对用户的社交技能进行了评分。我们通过比较训练前后的分数来评估系统的有效性,并使用我们提出的多模态系统确定他们的社交技能有了显著提高。基于计算机的社交技能训练对那些有社交困难的人很有用。这样的系统可供教师、治疗师和社交技能培训师随时随地用于康复以及作为基于人类的培训的补充使用。