Externalizing and interpreting autonomic arousal in people diagnosed with autism

[摘要] This research explores how externalization of physiological states helps to provide an awareness of hidden stressors through a home-based study, a lab-based study, and a school-based study in order to facilitate social understanding of people who are nonspeaking, especially those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). For people who experienced with hyper- or hypo-sensory responses (e.g., many people diagnosed with ASD), over-aroused situations or ;; meltdowns;; are often accompanied by incorrect attributions of potential stressors in their everyday lives. A series of physiology-based technologies are implemented as a toolkit (e.g., providing in-situ visual and tactile feedback, or enabling interactive and analytical indexing of collected data) for assisting the interpretations of individuals;; arousal states. First, the home-based study is a participant-driven study following Kanner;;s perspective of documenting ;;fascinating peculiarities;; in autism. I arrive in a family as an ethnographer documenting a dynamic process of hypothesizing and interpreting situations in order to seek a dialogue with a young man with ASD who is able to name objects, but does not use language in typical ways. Second, the lab-based study is a single-case design experiment with direct replications focusing on class teachers;; interpretations of arousal states in students diagnosed with ASD. The goal of this study is to assess how real-time displays of student physiological activity (i.e. heart rate) affect teacher estimation of arousal and relaxation. The results suggest that arousal estimation varies as a function of how physiological information is displayed. Third, the school- based study presents a collaboration with an occupational therapist (OT) and three teenage participants with ASD. This study documents the iterated investigations of the OT;;s interpretations with and without the presence of students;; physiological data (i.e. skin conductance data). This study demonstrates how participants;; arousal information assists the OT in making judgments from a clinical perspective. This dissertation presents an experimental method and toolkit to help calibrate typical assumptions about people diagnosed with ASD. With the intervention of physiology-based technologies, this research shows a novel approach of debugging reciprocal understanding of people in both naturalistic and experimental environments.

[发布机构] Massachusetts Institute of Technology