Why is it important?

It is surprising if we haven’t met a child with Autism. For a matter of fact, 85% of humans show signs of Autism. But most of us neither attend therapies nor have difficulty in communicating. Whilst there are so many kinds of therapies that take place, Art Therapy has been proved to be one of the effective and promising methods. Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder are believed to be more creative than an average human and is one way they express their thoughts and emotions.

Now taking this into context with 3 highlight factors of:

1. The increase in COVID-19 cases in every country made it impossible for physical therapies to take place even if it is with utmost precautions.
2. In India, every 23 children out of 10,000 born having ASD it becomes very important to make sure that everybody is offered the same treatment because it is a question of the youth who are believed to be the future citizens.
3. With high prices of a single therapy session and also lack of accessibility to these specialists, it becomes the hour of the need to connect parents and their peers to the right therapist who could treat their child.

framing the problem statement of

How can Art Therapy be made easily accessible and help in connecting therapists and children with Autism during these tough times?

We developed Express.

What did we develop?

Now Express is a paint application which is made specifically for children with Autism under the ambit of Art Therapy. This paint application includes 2 login conditions including one for the therapist/doctor and another being the parent login.

Parental Perspective:

As we are familiar with submitting art and drawing for competitions this follows the same format, where you open a new project and allow the child to experiment with all their creative skills through a set of colors and a brush. With a user friendly interface it could be very easy and knowledgeable for the child to get used to this application. Once the drawing/art is completed the parent just needs to submit it.

On the other hand, we are even giving an option to capture a picture of existing or already made drawings on papers. They just need to select and submit it. And this puts an end to the task of the parent.

Doctor's Perspective:

The doctor logs in to the app as well, through a unique generated user code and finds all the submissions in the welcome page by children that come under his provision. That is not it. Express has a unique feature where the doctor also receives a full fledged report on the drawing.

This includes a complete image processed analysis of the percentage of every color used showing the statistics of the color proportions. In addition to this it provides a complete timeline of the entire artwork. With the physical Art Therapies the doctor usually sees the end version of the drawing but here, with it's continuous screen capturing method, the doctor could just move a slider and see the artwork right from the first point of the color to the end version.

What does it do?

Once the artwork has been submitted following the steps mentioned in Parental Perspectives, the image shall be processed using technologies such as Computer Vision and Color extraction. In which, the colors in the artwork are extracted and are put in a statistical manner in the form of pie charts and histograms. With most of the things happening in the back-end, our efforts are on reducing the time span for the processing to take place and provide accurate and reliable results.

These statistics will be put in the form of a report with again a user friendly interface. So that it is very easy to interpret the data provided and for easier understanding.

How does it work?

While talking about a concept of communication through colors, every color signifies either mood, situation etc. And taking advantage of children with ASD are more creative than the average human, and usually show amazing artistic skills, this will allow us to interpret the emotional state of the child.

For example Red signifies anger, harsh feelings while subtle colors like yellow or white signify calmness or peace. In this way, the statistics that we will be providing will hel the doctor to understand the emotional status of the child, due to which rather than sticking to the conventional method of Art Therapy the doctor can focus on specific problems that the child is going through. With this we try to provide easy interpretable data, for providing specific treatments accordingly.

In the future aspects we wish to include ML considering we have enough data of artworks, colors and some other factors, which would help us to minimize the time span for the therapists to decide on the course of actions.

What do you hope to achieve?

Since we are currently dealing with a very small segment of Autism because not a lot of children go through Art Therapy, we wish to act small and think big. Which also means if non-verbal communication could be dealt with, which enables us to even deal with mute people or anyone who does actually express themselves either through writing or drawing.

In the future we also wish to include an aspect of education, by providing Express as a platform to learn through Machine Learning Algorithms and Convolution Neural Networks.