Stanford graduate student and Autism Google Glass team member, Catalin Voss was one of only a small handful of students awarded the 2016 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for his work with the Autism Google Glass team. His award and past successes are featured in an article by Scientific American. Please join us in saying contratulations to this increadible acheivement!

The Autism Google Glass team and a participant in Phase II sat down with KQED journalist, Lindsey Hoshaw, to be featured in an article published by KQED Science, “Google Glass flopped. But kids with autism are using it to learn emotions.” The article not only highlights work done by the glass team, but provides important attention to one of the projects participants, and how the device has helped her socialize with family and friends. The team is excited to get the word out about what google glass can do not only for participants in the study, but to more children with ASD who could benefit from the device.

In early March, Autism Google Glass team members Nick Haber and Catalin Voss attended Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Winter conference on Applications of Computer Vision in Lake Placid, New York. While there, they presented a poster for their paper “A practical approach to real-time neutral feature subtraction for facial expression recognition” and won Best Poster Award. The paper focuses on improving social interactions for children with autism through the use of wearable glasses that give real-time social cues to the wearer. The device can record the type of and amount of eye contact recorded from the wearer, which can be a critical component of behavioral therapy. The study in which the glasses are used involves 100 participants from ages 6-16.

Erin Digitale of Stanford Medicine News sat down with Dr. Wall to discuss the advancements in Autism research and diagnosis. He goes into roadblocks many families face today, what diagnostic tools and methods have looked like in the past, big-data computations, and the innovative ways they are restructuring the screening tests to identify developmental disorders earlier and quicker. Read more how Dr. Wall and his team are using technology and mathematics to make diagnosis of Autism and other developmental disorders faster, easier, and more accurate.

The Hartwell Foundation’s Autism Research and Technology Initiative (iHART) hopes to empower the global scientific research community with open access to a centralized repository of autism data with the potential to benefit children. We are so excited for iHART and can’t wait to see what it accomplishes! View the article here.