EngageMe: Multimodal Analysis of Attention among Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder for Digital Learning

Context & Background

EngageMe targets the development of an Intelligent Education Platform for children suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Online and digital learning setups have shown limited effectiveness for special needs children due to difficulties in sustaining attention. There is a strong need for personalized, monitored, and evidence-based identification of attention levels in children to design adaptive learning platforms.

Problems to be Addressed

Traditional special education requires subjective monitoring by trained educators, which is not scalable or standardizable across remote areas of India. There is also a major gap in the automatic evaluation of child attention levels in real-time. The lack of standard tools to measure attention in digital settings places a heavy burden on educators and parents trying to manage online schooling.

Aims and Objectives

1. Investigate the effectiveness of physiological signals (Galvanic Skin Response, Heart-Rate Variability, EEG, and eye-tracking) in evaluating attention levels.
2. Analyze audio-visual cues during online lecture settings.
3. Develop an ICT system using machine learning models for real-time attention assessment and adaptive content delivery.

Methodology

The project conducts controlled trials with 30 clinically diagnosed ADHD children and 30 neurotypical controls (aged 8-12). Over a week, children wear wireless sensors for GSR and EEG while desktop eye-trackers and webcams capture audio-visual signals during 20-minute learning tasks. Deep learning architectures fuse these multimodal features to perform real-time attention classification.

Expected Outcomes

The project delivers a beta version of the EngageMe software tool, trained algorithms for multi-modal attention classification, peer-reviewed publications in core AI conferences, and a non-invasive, scalable system that can be deployed remotely to special education centers in India.