Supporting autism spectrum disorder screening and intervention with machine learning and wearables: a systematic literature review

The number of autism spectrum disorder individuals is dramatically increasing. For them, it is difficult to get an early diagnosis or to intervene for preventing challenging behaviors, which may be the cause of social isolation and economic loss for all their family. This SLR aims at understanding and summarizing the current research work on this topic and analyze the limitations and open challenges to address future work. We consider papers published between 2015 and the beginning of 2021. The initial selection included about 2140 papers. 11 of them respected our selection criteria. The papers have been analyzed by mainly considering: (1) the kind of action taken on the autistic individual, (2) the considered wearables, (3) the machine learning approaches, and (4) the evaluation strategies. Results revealed that the topic is very relevant, but there are many limitations in the considered studies, such as reduced number of participants, absence of datasets and experimentation in real contexts, need for considering privacy issues, and the adoption of appropriate validation approaches. The issues highlighted in this analysis may be useful for improving machine learning techniques and highlighting areas of interest in which experimenting with the use of different noninvasive sensors.