Towards Safe Self-Stimulatory Behaviors in Autistic Children: HarmAlert4AutisticChildren (HA4AC)

Aleenah Khan, Hassan Foroosh

2025

Abstract

Self-Stimulatory behaviors, or stimming is quite common in Autism and can begin as early as infancy. Autistic infants may show early signs of stimming through repetitive movements such as hand flapping, rocking, or head banging. These stereotypical behaviors help self-regulation and are generally not harmful unless they pose a safety risk (e.g., head banging) or significantly interfere with daily activities. In such cases, the parent or caregiver must immediately intervene to ensure the safety of the child. To foster a safe environment for autistic children, we introduce a novel problem of identifying potentially harmful self-stimulatory behaviors to alert the parent / caregiver. To pave the way for research, we consolidated a video-based dataset “Har-mAlert4AutisticChildren” which categorizes autism-related stimming behaviors into two categories: helpful and harmful. We utilize existing publicly available video datasets that focus on a different problem of self-stimulatory behavior classification in autism. The curation process is based on a systematic review of the literature of clinical research studies that analyze the impacts of various self-stimulatory behaviors in autistic children. In addition to introducing a new research problem and a new dataset, we also provide baseline results using the Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model. The dataset and code are available on GitHub: https://github.com/AleenahK/HarmAlert4AutisticChildren-HA4AC.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Khan A. and Foroosh H. (2025). Towards Safe Self-Stimulatory Behaviors in Autistic Children: HarmAlert4AutisticChildren (HA4AC). In Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP; ISBN 978-989-758-728-3, SciTePress, pages 986-994. DOI: 10.5220/0013389700003912

in Bibtex Style

@conference{visapp25,
author={Aleenah Khan and Hassan Foroosh},
title={Towards Safe Self-Stimulatory Behaviors in Autistic Children: HarmAlert4AutisticChildren (HA4AC)},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP},
year={2025},
pages={986-994},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013389700003912},
isbn={978-989-758-728-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP
TI - Towards Safe Self-Stimulatory Behaviors in Autistic Children: HarmAlert4AutisticChildren (HA4AC)
SN - 978-989-758-728-3
AU - Khan A.
AU - Foroosh H.
PY - 2025
SP - 986
EP - 994
DO - 10.5220/0013389700003912
PB - SciTePress