An educational tool for teaching facial expressions and the emotions behind them to children with autism.
SAM's components. From left: Expression Blocks (brows, eyes, mouths), Face Board, Emotion Blocks.
The Context
Children with autism face difficulties in identifying facial expressions and the emotions behind them. These difficulties in understanding and interpreting emotions results in their lack of empathy towards others, causing them to respond inappropriately in social-emotional scenarios(e.g. laughing when another child falls down).
The Concept
SAM aims to make recognising facial expressions simpler by breaking it up into key components such as the brows, eyes and mouth. In so doing build up an autistic child’s bank of facial expressions and emotions vocabulary.
The User Journey
Learn how SAM is used in the video below:
How It Works
Each Expression Block and Emotion Block is embedded with a resistor of a certain value unique to itself. Using Arduino as a platform, it reads the resistance of each piece which is placed on the Face Board and passes it through a code which determines and appropriate output/response.
