Detecting Agitation Before Behavioral Escalation in Autistic Youth Through Multimodal Wearable Sensing

Abstract:Challenging behaviors including aggression, self-injury, and property destruction are observed in 68% of autistic youth and pose risks to youth and caregivers. These episodes are preceded by agitation, a rising state of distress expressed through movement, vocalization, and autonomic arousal. Its signs are subtle and individualized, and its autonomic components are invisible without instrumentation. We collected upper-body movement from inertial measurement units, physiology from a wrist-worn device, and vocalizations from lapel microphones across 30 clinician-led sessions with 15 autistic youth, paired with expert behavioral annotations. We adapt four pretrained foundation models, one per modality, project each to a shared 128-dimensional space, and fuse them into a single group model. The model detected agitation with an area under the ROC curve of 0.724 at the clinician-annotated onset (within-participant permutation p=0.0005), declining to 0.608 at 30,s before onset. Thirteen of fifteen participants were above chance. A from-scratch configuration reached only 0.58, while frozen and fine-tuned features performed comparably (0.71 and 0.72). Audio contributed most of the signal, and a watch-only configuration stayed near chance. Individualized agitation is therefore detectable, including in unannotated windows preceding the annotated onset, using foundation-model transfer with one shared model rather than one per child.

Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.24791 [cs.HC]

(or arXiv:2609.24791v1 [cs.HC] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.24791 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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