自閉症スペクトラムに運動が及ぼす改善効果の定量的評価

抄録

This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of an exercise on the people with autism spectrum disorder using the NeuCube spiking neural network (SNN) architecture. We collected EEG patterns during perception and imitation of facial expressions for each emotion. Comparing the collected data in perceiving and mimicking facial expressions, EEG patterns of typically developed person were very similar. This fact suggest that it seems that there are mirror neurons on facial expression in the human brain. Recently, some studies have been reported that mirror neuron system does not work well in the case of subjects with brain disorders. In this paper, we observed mirror neurons during normal perception and imitation of facial expressions in typically developed subjects (TP), ASD subjects who exercise regularly (ASDe), and ASD subjects who don't exercise regularly (ASDn). As a result of experiments, we confirmed the mirror neuron activities of ASDe subjects tend to be close to ones of TP subjects compared to ones of ASDn subjects. The results in the experiments imply the effects of regular exercise on autism spectrum disorder.