Development of an affective-based e-healthcare system for autistic children

This work focused on the development of an affective-based e-Healthcare system for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) children, especially in African rural areas, deprived of access to quality healthcare. Inaccessibility to quality healthcare facilities has a negative effect on the well-being of the vulnerable and; the challenge of not understanding their emotional states can be stressful on the part of the caregivers/parents. We developed a wearable emotional-based e-Healthcare controller using electrodermal activity and speech recognizer sensors to obtain physiological data from autistic children. The physiological data were analysed and classified into seven emotional states, using a fuzzy inference system. We obtained 92.07% accuracy of classification. An intelligent recommender module is also designed to recommend music therapy to considerably reduce the rate of meltdown and was found to be effective. The affective system is integrated into an e-Healthcare system for accessibility to specialists/therapists. Therefore, the system developed shows that the integration of an affective-based e-Healthcare system helps to monitor the physiological state of children with autism regardless of their location. (C) 2020 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of African Institute of Mathematical Sciences / Next Einstein Initiative.