Plexlines: Tracking Socio-communicative Behaviors Using Timeline Visualizations.

In this paper, we visualize children's coordinated gaze, gesture, and vocalization to better understand communicative behaviors and to identify developmental delay, specifically in the domain of Autism Spectrum Disorders. To date, existing behavioral data from clinical assessment instruments are often stored in raw text files or spreadsheets. This wealth of data is then represented as a single number summarizing behavior. Our approach transforms this data into a graphical story of a child's behavior. To do this, we created Plexlines, a graphical record of a child's social and communicative behavior. When presented with Plexlines, clinicians and researchers formed their own strategies for exploring the visualizations and independently identified children in need of further evaluation. Feedback showed that Plexlines has the potential to be integrated into existing behavioral evaluation processes, aid in the detection of developmental delays in young children, and serve as a visual artifact to better communicate with parents.