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Progress in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can make a real difference in the quality-of-life of persons with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by acting on several aspects, from customized software for communication, to emotion recognition, to social behavior and also to provide systems for the observation of the wide spectrum of manifestations, to ease the diagnosis, to support the therapy, and to monitor the improvement and the growth of children with ASD. This has been achieved by the introduction of a large number of innovative technologies, spanning from Internet of Things, to robotics, virtual and augmented reality, etc. Differently from other surveys on the same research area, we focus this survey on innovative technologies used in this field, and we organize a classification of the papers based on three different but strictly crossed axis, namely the triad of impairment (either communication, social interaction, or social behaviors), research purpose (either diagnosis or therapy), and system activity (either monitoring or intervention). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Abnormal sensory reactivity is considered one of the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and has been associated with autism severity, poorer functional outcomes, and behavioral difficulties across the lifespan. Its early characterization could provide valuable insights into the processes favoring the instantiation of maladaptive behaviors. Objectives: The present study has two aims: (1) to describe the sensory profile of preschool children with ASD compared with an age-matched population of children with a diagnosis of language disorder (DLD) and typically developing (TD) control peers; (2) to explore within each group whether the sensory alterations play a predictive role in the instantiation of emotional and behavioral issues. Methods: The parents of 42 ASD, 18 DLD, and 56 TD filled out the Sensory Processing Measure—Preschool (SPM-P). To gather information on competencies, behaviors, and emotional problems of children, the Child Behavior Checklist 1½-5 (CBCL 1½-5) was also administered. Results: On the SPM-P, ASD and DLD samples generally had scores more compromised than control peers. The contrast between ASD and DLD was reflected in a higher (and highly significant) impairment on the social participation and hearing subscales, suggesting a greater sensitivity and a possible specificity of these scores for ASD. More importantly, linear regression analyses revealed a strong and predictive association for ASD children with SPM total scores explaining more than 50% of the variance of the CBCL 1½-5 total scores (p < 0.001). Conclusions: Our findings reinforce the need to detect the abnormal sensory profiles of ASD already at an early stage and during clinical evaluations. Due to the impact on the emotional and behavioral manifestations, such a procedure has significant clinical and social implications, potentially guiding the development of new interventions relying on multisensory strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Sensory reactivity is considered one of the diagnostic criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and has been associated with poorer functional outcomes, behavioral difficulties, and autism severity across the lifespan. The characterization of the sensory processing in ASD has thus become crucial to identify the sensory and motor features influencing the development of personal autonomy. Objectives: The present study has two aims: (1) to compare the sensory processing between school-aged children with ASD and typically developing peers (TD); (2) to evaluate whether, within the ASD sample, the cognitive level and reported sensory symptoms explain the scores exhibited at the Sensory Processing Measure (SPM-2). Methods: The SPM-2 test was administered to the parents of 105 children with ASD and 70 TD. The ASD group was further subdivided into two groups, namely high and low functioning based on their cognitive level (High Functioning (HF), IQ > 80; Low Functioning (LF), IQ < 80). Results: ASD children exhibited higher scores throughout the SPM-2 total score and its multiple subscales. Within ASD, while HF and LF children did not differ in terms of the SPM-2 total score, a significant difference was found for the hearing, social participation, and balance and motion subscales. Conclusions: Aside from classical knowledge that the ASD population suffers from sensory processing disorders, we revealed that different sensory patterns are associated with high or low cognitive functioning. Beyond its neurobiological interest, such knowledge may be of fundamental importance for individualizing psychoeducational interventions in preschool- and school-aged children and later developmental stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates whether ICT technology can enhance applied behavior analysis (ABA) rehabilitation therapy for children with autism. A technology-enhanced rehabilitation system to support the daily work of ABA tutors, parents and teachers was created, involving ABA experts and parents of autistic children in the entire design phase, in order to better understand the system’s functional requirements and enhance its usability. Thus, combining the ABA programs with a learning analytics tool, an open-source Web application, ABCD SW, was implemented for teaching and monitoring learning in low-functioning autistic children. In a small pilot study the system was tested on seven children with autism enrolled in an intensive intervention lasting 9 months. The children were assessed before and after the pilot test, using Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales to measure their personal and social skills. Test participants showed improved communication, especially in the expressive category (p < 0.05). Subjective feedback from the ABA team involved in the user test confirmed the children’s improvement in socialization, communication and behavior. ABCD SW expedites the intervention (thus increasing its efficiency) and makes it more pleasant for the children. Furthermore, ABCD SW enables caregivers to easily conduct and personalize the intervention, reducing its cost. The study seems to suggest that ABCD SW, and ICT technology in general, can enhance ABA rehabilitation therapy for children with autism, encouraging further investigation of this promising research field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including parallel programming, parallel computers, and CPU/GPU multi-core architectures.

Visual sensor networks (VSNs) perform complex scene analysis algorithms that require significant computations and communications. Under this respect, the use of skeletons contributes to reduce the complexity of VSN programming and may ensure an easier and better optimization of the code. In this context, we propose INS, a stencil based skeleton targeted for wireless/visual sensor networks (W/VSNs) and give a preliminary analysis of its benefits using tracking as a case study. INS abstracts a distributed approximation schema in which the estimation of a given metric is organized in a sequence of steps. Each step includes collecting estimates from some neighbor nodes and local computation of a new approximation. In particular, INS takes inspiration from some stencil based skeletons proposed for parallel computation and merges it with the classical event driven model typical of sensor programming. As a result, the execution of each step is triggered by the detection of a relevant event in the environment. Tracking consists in periodically predicting position and velocity of one or more mobile targets. We discuss how INS can be instantiated to a distributed version of Kalman filtering. As energy efficiency is central in W/VSNs, we derive analytic models for energy dissipation of the INS skeleton depending on different concepts of neighborhood for the data exchanged at each step. Then, these models are used to guide the deployment of our tracking application on a real scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parallel programming has proved to be an effective technique to increase the performance of computationally intensive applications. However, writing parallel programs is not easy, and activities such as debugging are usually hard and time consuming. To cope with these difficulties, skeletal parallel programming has been widely explored in recent years with very promising results. However, prototypal skeletal systems developed so far tend to be rather inflexible and difficult to adapt to many practical parallelization scenarios. For instance, many systems restrict all the substructures of an application being encapsulated together in term of possibly nested skeletons, which may be cumbersome when parallelizing some large and complex applications. Moreover, it is usually difficult to share resources among different skeleton instances and to reuse the same instance of a skeleton in different parts of the code. This paper reports on the current status of the OcamIP3I (2.0) system, which sensibly changes the skeletal model of the previous versions, making it more usable and flexible. In particular, we describe the new skeletons, the new skeletal execution model as well as related issues on design and implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a very simple, yet powerful, distribution calculus aimed at describing different strategies that can be used to distribute (ie, partition and replicate) multidimensional dense arrays over a set of processors, like what is done in the implementation of the P3L Map skeleton. We give a formal semantics, that allows to prove equations between distributions, and we show how to associate a cost to such distributions, allowing to choose between semantically equivalent distribution strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Network of Tasks (NOT) model allows adaptive node programs written in a variety of parallel languages to be connected together in an almost acyclic task graph. The main difference between NOT and other task graphs is that it is designed to make the performance of the graph predictable from knowledge of the performance of the component node programs and the visible structure of the graph. It can therefore be regarded as a coordination language that is transparent about performance. For large-scale computations that are distributed to geographically-distributed compute servers, the NOT model helps programmers to plan, assemble, schedule, and distribute their problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a parallel programming methodology that ensures easy programming, efficiency and portability of programs to different machines belonging to the class of the general-purpose, distributed-memory, MIMD architectures. The methodology is based on the definition of a new, high-level, explicitly parallel language, called P3L, and of a set of static tools that automatically adapt the program features for each target architecture. P3L does not require programmers to specify process activations, the actual parallelism degree, scheduling, or interprocess communications, i.e. all those features that need to be adjusted to harness each specific target machine. Parallelism is on the other hand, expressed in a structured and qualitative way, by hierarchical composition of a restricted set of language constructs, corresponding to those forms of parallelism that are frequently encountered in parallel applications, and that can be efficiently implemented. The efficient portability of P3L applications is guaranteed by the compiler along with the novel structure of the support. The compiler automatically adapts the program features for each specific architecture, using the costs (in terms of performance) of the low-level mechanisms exported by the architecture itself, In our methodology, these costs, along with other features of the architecture, are viewed through an abstract machine, whose interface is used by the compiler to produce the final object code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observing how children manipulate objects while they are playing can help detect possible autism spectrum disorders (ASD) at an early stage. For this purpose, specialists seek the so-called "red-flags" of motor signature of ASD for more precise diagnostic tests. However, a significant drawback to achieve this is that the observation of object manipulation by the child very often is not naturalistic, as it involves the physical presence of the specialist and is typically performed in hospitals. In this framework, we present a novel Internet of Things support in the form factory of a smart toy that can be used by specialists to perform indirect and non-invasive observations of the children in naturalistic conditions. While they play with the toy, children can be observed in their own environment and without the physical presence of the specialist. We also present the technical validation of the technology and the study protocol for the refinement of the diagnostic practice based on this technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show worse oral health than their peers. Their access to health services is, at present, inadequate: few high-quality interventions have been designed and implemented to improve their care procedures so far. The purpose of this study is to describe an experience of dental care supported by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), for children with ASD in a public health service. In our study, 59 children (mean age 9.9 years; SD = 5.43) participated in the MyDentist project. It integrates classic dental care techniques with new practices for desensitization and fear control, delivered through an enhanced customized ICT-based intervention aiming at familiarizing the child with ASD with the medical setting and procedures. Two questionnaires were filled out by parents to describe the acceptability of the MyDentist experience for their children. Significant results were shown from T0 (before initiating MyDentist) to T1 (after 6 months of the MyDentist experience) regarding improved oral hygiene and cooperation during dental treatments. Families positively assessed the use of ICT support. In conclusion, the project demonstrated acceptability by parents, suggesting that public health dental care and prevention can be successfully implemented without resorting to costly pharmacological interventions (with potential side effects), taking better care of children's health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Tests based on human figure drawings (HFD) have captured the attention of clinicians and psychologists for a long time. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the performance of HFD of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) relative to typically developing (TD) controls. Methods: All children were asked to draw three human figures (man, woman, self-portrait) and were evaluated with a neuropsychological battery. HFD were scored according to the Maturity Scale, and correlative approaches testing maturity against neuropsychological scores were applied. Results: ASDs presented marked deficits in maturity. No significant correlation emerged for both groups between maturity and the theory of mind test. On the contrary, positive and significant correlations between maturity and the affect recognition test (AR) were found, with group-specific patterns. In TD, this result regarded drawings of others, but not self-portraits, while an opposite pattern emerged for ASD, whose sole maturity in self-portraits significantly correlated with the AR scores. Conclusion: These findings suggest that the use of HFD tests with individuals with autism may not be used in clinical practices. However, in basic research, HFDs could be used to highlight dependencies between drawing performance and neuropsychological features, thus possibly providing hints on the functioning of autism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In-network storage of data in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is considered a promising alternative to external storage since it contributes to reduce the communication overhead inside the network. Recent approaches to data storage rely on Geographic Hash Tables (GHT) for efficient data storage and retrieval. These approaches, however, assume that sensors are uniformly distributed in the sensor field, which is seldom true in real applications. Also they do not allow tuning the redundancy level in the storage according to the importance of the data to be stored. To deal with these issues, we propose an approach based on two mechanisms. The first is aimed at estimating the real network distribution. The second exploits data dispersal method based on the estimated network distribution. Experiments through simulation show that our approach approximates quite closely the real distribution of sensors and that our dispersal protocol sensibly reduces data losses due to unbalanced data load. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]