The Bug Club, we called it. In kindergarten, my best friend and I would spend all of recess playing in the grass, the mud and the woods, looking for bugs and insects. Sometimes we secretly stole fruit from the cafeteria and left it out to attract bugs; sometimes we built little clay homes for bugs. It was our own world and it was our way of interacting with the world.
As we grew up in elementary school, we became more and more distant. My best friend, who we’ll call Hypot, began to have a mean streak; she would pinch, and poke me with a pencil, and laugh about it. I didn’t understand.
Not until years later, after Hypot had moved away, did I learn that she had been diagnosed with a form of high-functioning autism. She perceived the world in entirely different ways! It was profoundly eye-opening to talk with her, years later. Hypot once said that she knew she had a crush on someone, she just didn’t know who. One of her Facebook posts began with:
“YES. Autism is more than just a difference in social abilities. It has an effect on sensory processing, body type, metabolism, and all kinds of other stuff they haven’t worked out yet…the physical and chemical structure of the brain is different.
THIS IS REALLY COOL!”
I wished I had tried harder to understand her in elementary school.
Autism is especially complex, because it is both a vast spectrum of degree and a myriad collection of seemingly unrelated symptoms. For example, amazingly, 50% of autistic children also have problems with the GI tract.
How autism can impact vision
This complexity makes Autism particularly difficult to develop assistive technologies for. Recently, however, a neuroscientist named Ned Sahin realized that the technology of Google Glass could be harnessed to help autistic children learn. Sahin founded a Cambridge-based start-up called Brain Power which develops several applications on Google Glass for autistic children.
For example, one application visually highlights eyes, because autistic children sometimes have difficulty learning to make eye contact and will focus on someone’s mouth instead. Another application involves classifying people’s expressions.
Classifying emotions with Google Glass
This is indeed really cool.
This is really fantastic, thank you for drawing my attention to the work this company is doing. I also really liked that you started your post with a personal story, and moved on to the interesting research/technology tidbit. One recommendation I have is to make sure you include links in your post so that people can easily access the interesting topics you are discussing.