Holli is a Google Glass’ application helps children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to learn about social skills.

Children with AHD will benefit from this technology since ‘it is a motivating learning medium’ (Williams et al., 2002) and ‘the technology provides a highly motivating medium for a rehearsal of skills in a safe, controlled, self-paced manner’ (Parson et al., 2000).

‘The interesting thing about our new technology is that we are not trying to replace human to human interaction; instead we use this app to coach children to communicate with people in real-world situation,’ as said to Azadah Kushki, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedicals and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto and Scientist at the Bloorview Research Institute Toronto, Canada (DeLaOsa, 2017).

Holli will capture the conversation between the users and the partner via embedded Google Glass’s microphone. The Google Speech recognition engine will translate the spoken word into text and displayed through the head mounted display.

When Google Speech Recognition processes the spoken words before offering recommendation to users

The sample of conversation after Holli processed the spoken words using the Google Speech recognition engine

Children with AHD will benefit from this technology since ‘it is a motivating learning medium’ (Williams et al., 2002) also ‘the technology provides a highly motivating medium for a rehearsal of skills in a safe, controlled, self-paced manner’ (Parson et al., 2000).

The team would hope that the more children with ASD can enjoy the benefits from Holli to improve their social skills.

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Adapted from: ECN Magazine with additional resources from Frontiersin.org