Towards an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) care agent for social interaction

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurological disorder that impacts a subject's ability to be involved in a social interaction. A large body of work exists on the detection of ASD using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms. Further the use of eXplainable artificial intelligence (XAI) algorithms is being advocated in the healthcare domain (on account of the 'black-box' nature of DL algorithms), to the best of our knowledge, no social interaction model based eXplainable Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) care agent exists for social interaction training of an ASD subject. Therefore, we make a beginning in this direction through this work. We present a novel architecture of an eXplainable ASD care agent for social interaction training of ASD subjects, with an underlying intelligent AI algorithm. We elucidate its working through six representative social interaction scenarios and put forward some practical considerations when the agent is put in practice with the ASD subject. We hope that the interested researchers can develop further on the work in future.