A Technological Framework to Support Standardized Protocols for the Diagnosis and Assessment of ASD

In this work a first attempt to undertake the difficult challenge of embedding a technological level into a standardized protocol for Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) diagnose and assessment is introduced. In particular the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS-2) is taken under consideration and a technological framework is introduced to compute, in an objective and automatic way, the evaluation scores for some of the involved tasks. The proposed technological framework makes use of a hidden RGB-D device for scene acquisition. Acquired data then feed a cascade of algorithmic steps by which people and objects are detected and temporally tracked and then extracted information is exploited by fitting a spatial and temporal model described by means of an ontology-based approach. The ontology metadata are finally processed to find a mapping between them and the behavioral tasks described in the protocol.