Written by Lars Rengersen on 2/09/2010
We’re happy to announce that our mobile application Snapje (emotion recognition in relation to context to help children with autism) has been selected out of 160 candidates and is now one of the 20 nominees to go through to the second round.
Vodafone Mobile Clicks is an international, high profile contest for the best mobile internet startup. The best mobile internet startup is selected by a professional jury in three different jury rounds. The jury selected the very best entries based on the 5 criteria mentioned below:
- Originality, creativity and innovativeness
- Technical and operational ability
- Economic and financial viability (business case)
- Use case and end-user value
- The quality of the members of the (management) team (e.g. their experience, knowledge, skills, relationships)
Snapje is an application to practise emotion recognition in relation to the context for children with autism. We’re very happy that we made it to the second round. This gives us a lot of (positive!) energy!
More information can be found here: http://www.vodafonemobileclicks.com/blog/
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Written by Lars Rengersen on 12/08/2010
Today I came across an interesting article – iHelp for Autism – on San Francisco Weekly about the iPad and autism. It’s about Leo, a boy with intense autism who he learns very slowly. Even though the iPad has not been specifically designed for people with special needs, it seems to work very well. A combination of a flat and portable device with a screen big enough to facilitate easy navigation opens up a new range of possibilities.
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Written by Marco van Hout on 17/03/2010
Today, I stumbled upon an interesting article that refers to research done at Emory University. The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is part of an effort to learn more about the impact of cartoons and video games on the human brain.
“Humans experience emotional engagement with animated characters, empathizing with happiness, sadness or other emotions displayed by the characters”
To understand why humans relate to artificial characters in this way, they set out to determine if chimpanzees would respond empathetically to virtual characters. The researchers used contagious yawning to test empathetic response. “Yawns are contagious in the same way other emotional responses, like smiles, frowns and fear, are contagious,” said Matthew Campbell, the lead researcher.
The chimps yawned significantly more in response to 3D animations of yawning than they did to animated chimps making control mouth movements.
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