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Using technology developed at MIT to measure emotion and stress in children with Autism and in the general population.

In follow-up to previously posted video, this full article details MIT's Media Lab research on monitoring electrodermal activity (EDA), a measure of sympathetic arousal, and on advancing autism communication through 4 active research areas.

This article further details the research behind the video I previously posted relating to emerging technology related to autism emotion and communication.

The public school district in St. Louis, Missouri was awarded an Innovative Technology Education Fund grant to buy iPads for all students with autism in six autism-specific classrooms. This seems to be an example of utilizing an emerging technology in an excellent way with proper teacher training, rather than using technology for technology's sake. The schools will be advised on how to implement the iPads by an autism science and advocacy organization and have two full days of professional development planned.

This is great news on the autism-rights front! I know a severely autistic 21-year-old who is highly communicative because of the technology he has used since he was young.

I have found Zaid's blog postings to be very appealing visually (with good use of colors) and to the point (with higher signal to noise ratio). Here is an example of a "1, 2, 3" style posting on the important topic of Autism with Dr. Martha Hebert (a prominent Harvard Medical School researcher and clinician).

This is a 2 minute trailer for a documentary on technology to help children and adults with autism communicate and learn. It is quite inspiring, as well as a bit emotion provoking.

FoxNews Beware.

go half way down the page for the WearCam, which is capable of perceiving and visualizing social-emotional information in real-time human interaction. The idea is to use this to help individuals with Autism and Asperger's understand and react appropriately to the emotions of the people with whom they interact.

A wearable camera system (Self-Cam) to improve recognition of emotions from real-world faces in young adults with Asperger syndrome  and high-functioning autism 

This article describes a new early detection method that uses eye-tracking technologies to gauge babies' social engagement skills and reliably measure their risk of developing autism.

This is a nice follow-up to Kasthuri's post from the 60 Minutes segment. A Toronto teacher who works with special needs students says Apple's iPad has become an important tool in helping her students communicate and learn. Stacie Carroll, a teacher at Toronto's Beverly Public School, told Metro Morning host Matt Galloway the iPad has helped teachers connect with students - including those with autism - who often struggle to communicate.

Superb episode on 60 minutes on iPad Apps for autistic children

To what extent can robots substitute for human mentors and therapists?

Looks like there is some funding available to scientifically evaluate MOOCs for remedial education! I think the results will be interesting to see, since I remember from discussion or a reading that some ed tech seems to work for autism and special needs students...so maybe MOOCs also have a niche.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is offering ten grants for MOOCs that reach lower achievers in schools.

The trend: They already help teach kids the alphabet, sentence construction and how to graph equations. Now, iPads are being studied as a tool for students with autism and physical disabilities. University of Toronto professor Rhonda McEwen is researching how students at Toronto's Beverley School - which teaches special needs kids from kindergarten to Grade 8 - learn with iPad apps and games that require touch. In addition, the link from the smartboard section of the article, leads to a very interesting TED Talk about how to make smartboards.