A Real-Time Selective Speaker Cancellation System for Relieving Social Anxiety in Autistics

Due to hypersensitivity to sound, patients with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) can feel frustrated and even profoundly fearful when talking with multiple speakers. This exacerbates their impairments in social interaction and communication. We propose a fully interactive system that allows ASD patient to focus on a single auditory stream (a person's voice) according to their preference during conversations. The system has the capacity to filter out other speakers' voices based on distinguishing their locations. The experimental results have demonstrated our prototyping system works reliably in regular conversations.