The DREAM Dataset: Supporting a data-driven study of autism spectrum disorder and robot enhanced therapy

PLoS One. 2020 Aug 21;15(8):e0236939. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0236939. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

We present a dataset of behavioral data recorded from 61 children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The data was collected during a large-scale evaluation of Robot Enhanced Therapy (RET). The dataset covers over 3000 therapy sessions and more than 300 hours of therapy. Half of the children interacted with the social robot NAO supervised by a therapist. The other half, constituting a control group, interacted directly with a therapist. Both groups followed the Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) protocol. Each session was recorded with three RGB cameras and two RGBD (Kinect) cameras, providing detailed information of children's behavior during therapy. This public release of the dataset comprises body motion, head position and orientation, and eye gaze variables, all specified as 3D data in a joint frame of reference. In addition, metadata including participant age, gender, and autism diagnosis (ADOS) variables are included. We release this data with the hope of supporting further data-driven studies towards improved therapy methods as well as a better understanding of ASD in general.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Autism Spectrum Disorder / therapy*
  • Behavior
  • Child
  • Databases, Factual*
  • Evidence-Based Medicine
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Medical Informatics*
  • Robotics*

Grants and funding

This work was funded by the EU, under the Seventh Frame Programme grant #611391: Development of Robot-Enhanced therapy for children with AutisM spectrum disorders (DREAM). The commercial company SoftBank Robotics provided support in the form of salaries for author A.M., but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.