The Brain Power System is the first AR, smart glasses-based system for autism in the world. It is made to empower adults and kids with autism to teach themselves essential cognitive, social, and emotional skills. This outstanding technology has been heralded as a game-changer, and essential to dealing with the vital therapeutic shortages that adults and kids face. Medical applications for augmented reality have begun expanding as app developers recognize that certain conditions are a perfect fit with the benefits of AR. For autism augmented reality is a perfect match.
Everyone is unique, but the majority on the spectrum have a problem with skills all of us work to master, like communication, managing behaviors, and transitions, decoding emotions, eye contact decoding, etc. With the help of these wearable platforms, instead of phones or tablets that require looking down, Empower Me encourages social conversation with others, keeping people hands-free, heads-up, and engaged with their loved ones and the world.
Empower Me not only helps in aiding psychological understanding, but also comes with apps that help with transition management, an everyday activity that challenges some on the autism spectrum. It also has apps created to focus on social cues, which include the ability to concentrate on eyes and face areas when it’s desirable to do so. While this is a helpful skill, e.g., for obtaining employment, it might be stressful. So, Empower Me also assesses physiological symptoms of stress and regulates the experience accordingly. These types of systems enable therapeutic experiences through autism augmented reality.
Empower Me has an AR environment where users can connect with the world around them assisted by a non-intrusive display of smart visual cues. Empower Me also uses leading-edge emotion AI and gamification methods depending on scientific principles to encourage adults and kids to conquer behavioral and social issues.
A web-based dashboard which is accessible from any place globally can be used to monitor user performance. The dashboard offers quantitative measurements outlining the progress, strengths, and challenges of the user. For families, it offers numerical predictions and data they have never had access to before. For Board Certified Behavior Analysts and other therapists, it provides a method to gauge and demonstrate the progress of their clients’ objectively and to offer families an organized and enjoyable solution to practice and measure progress between therapy sessions.
How It Operates – Autism Augmented Reality
The Brain Power Autism System is a digital coach that runs on smart glasses — like Google Glass — to empower those with autism to train themselves in cognitive and social skills. Contrary to other emotion and social apps, where people are looking down at a phone or tablet, the BPAS-4 encourages social conversation with other people, keeping people hands-free, heads-up, and engaged with their loved ones and the world.
Brain Power and Affectiva’s Emotion Recognition Technology
The BPAS-4 features a household of applications, dedicated to assisting with an array of problems, which include educational planning, eye contact, emotion recognition, and self-control. Affectiva’s emotion recognition technology is an important component in aiding to power the Brain Power System’s emotion analysis algorithms, assisting to precisely characterize body language and facial expressions into emotional categories in real time.
Since early 2016, Affectiva and Brain Power teams have been working closely across several areas, leveraging the newest versions of Affectiva’s emotion recognition SDK to constantly create and perfect emotion-based applications in the Brain Power System. The collaboration between the research and scientific teams at Affectiva and Brain Power has been enormous, with both companies being heavily influenced by their MIT and Harvard roots.
Brain Power’s technology has had positive feedback from professionals, people on the spectrum, and parents. It is being authenticated through continuing clinical trial programs and published research. Up until now, research has been published in several peer-reviewed, PubMed-indexed medical journals, with multiple in the press. Empower Me has been clinically proven to be tolerable, safe, and feasible, and has shown a decrease in scores on the Aberrant Behavioral Checklist in kids with autism.
Brain Power’s puts a new spin on therapy and gives clinicians a highly inspiring learning tool that is important for working with those with autism. The unique presentation, with its gaming quality, is key to bringing out and sustaining focus on otherwise demanding activities. Apart from superior client engagement, the tool offers therapists an unequaled platform for the collection of data, since Empower Me records reactions without a glitch. This will be an important tool for any modern clinic.
Brain Power is led by an established team of world-class technologists, educators, researchers, and clinicians. Team members consist of both people who identify as autistic and neurotypical people. Founder and CEO Dr. Ned Sahin, an entrepreneur and acclaimed neuroscientist, founded Brain Power to merge neuroscience with technology advancement to assist those with different abilities and special challenges. Key members of the executive team of Brain Power include Neha Keshav, Ph.D., director of research; Arshya Vahabzadeh, MD, chief medical officer; and Joey Salisbury, Ph.D., director of software development.
