Samsung Creates ‘Look At Me’, An App For Austism Patients

With no known cure for that Autism, Samsung worked on an app that helps kids with the disease learn to make eye-contact with other people, something Autism sufferers fail to do.

The app is an interactive camera that helps kids focus on one person, as well as including face detection features and games that the kids can play with. According to Samsung’s official blog Samsung Village, ‘Samsung collaborated with doctors and professors from Seoul National University and Yonsei University to develop the Look At Me app and conducted joint clinical trial with 20 children for 8 weeks’. 

Over this time, it was observed that the kids started to make more eye contact with others, even figuring out emotions through facial expressions. The app is meant to increase autistic kids’ perception of facial expressions and emotions, according to Professor Kyong-Mee Chung at Yonsei University.

Adding on, Chung Lyong Lee, who is the Vice President of Corporate Citizenship Group at Samsung said, “Look At Me is a light, fun and game-like app that parents can play with their children to get them accustomed to making eye contact and reading people’s emotions. We hope we can play a small part in improving the lives of children around the world.”

In Zambia, not many kids are diagnosed as Autistic, but may be misdiagnosed as simply mentally unstable.

The idea for the ‘Look At Me’ app came from Samsung’s initiative called People Campaign which is a project that gets the best ideas from around the world and uses technology to make them come to be. The co-creators of ‘Look At Me’ are Professor Hee-Jeong Yoo from Seoul National University Bundag Hospital and Professor Kyong-Mee Chung and Sang-Chul Chong from Yonsei University Department of Psychology.

The scientists recommend that people using the app not use it for more than 15-20 minutes everyday as that is how long every interactive feature/mission on the app takes to complete.

Below is a video shared by Samsung of the progress made with the ‘Look At Me’ app by one 11 year old autistic participant named Jong-Hyung Kim:

The ‘Look At Me’ app is compatible with following Samsung devices: Galaxy S3, Galaxy S4, Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 2, Galaxy Note 3, Galaxy Note 4,  Galaxy Zoom, Galaxy Zoom 2 and Galaxy Tab S.

Details on when the app will be available from the Google Play Store are yet to be revealed.