Agitated Behaviors Detection in Children with ASD Using Wearable Data

Abstract Children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often exhibit agitated behaviors that can isolate them from their peers. This study aims to examine if wearable data, collected during everyday activities, could effectively detect such behaviors. First, we used the Empatica E4 device to collect real data including Blood Volume Pulse (BVP), Electrodermal Activity (EDA), and Acceleration (ACC), from a 9-years-old male child with autism over 6 months. Second, we analyzed and extracted numerous features from each signal, and employed different classifiers including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (FR), eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and TabNet. Our preliminary findings showed good performance in comparison with the state of the art. Notably, XGBoost demonstrated the highest performance in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The accuracy achieved in this paper using XGBoost is equal to $$80\%$$ 80% which exceeds previous research.