In Mexico, according to data from the General Directorate of Health Information (2018), there is an annual incidence of 689 newborns with Trisomy 21, well-known as Down Syndrome. Worldwide, this incidence is estimated between 1 in every 1000 newborns, approximately. That is why this work focuses on the detection and analysis of facial emotions in children with Down Syndrome in order to predict their emotions throughout a dolphin-assisted therapy. In this work, two databases are used: Exploratory Data Analysis, with a total of 20,214 images, and the Down’s Syndrome Dataset database, with 1445 images for training, validation, and testing of the neural network models. The construction of two architectures based on a Deep Convolutional Neural Network manages an efficiency of 79%, when these architectures are tested with a large reference image database. Then, the architecture that achieves better results is trained, validated, and tested in a small-image database with the facial emotions of children with Down Syndrome, obtaining an efficiency of 72%. However, this increases by 9% when the brain activity of the child is included in the training, resulting in an average precision of 81%. Using electroencephalogram (EEG) signals in a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) along with the Down’s Syndrome Dataset (DSDS) has promising advantages in the field of brain–computer interfaces. EEG provides direct access to the electrical activity of the brain, allowing for real-time monitoring and analysis of cognitive states. Integrating EEG signals into a CNN architecture can enhance learning and decision-making capabilities. It is important to note that this work has the primary objective of addressing a doubly vulnerable population, as these children also have a disability.

This study explores the potential of using a Siamese Network as a biomarker for assessing the effectiveness of Dolphin-Assisted Therapy (DAT) in children with Spastic Cerebral Palsy (SCP). The problem statement revolves around the need for objective measures to evaluate the impact of DAT on patients with SCP, considering the subjective nature of traditional assessment methods. The methodology involves training a Siamese network, a type of neural network designed to compare similarities between inputs, using data collected from SCP patients undergoing DAT sessions. The study employed Event-Related Potential (ERP) and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) analyses to examine cerebral activity and brain rhythms, proposing the use of SNN to compare electroencephalographic (EEG) signals of children with cerebral palsy before and after Dolphin-Assisted Therapy. Testing on samples from four children yielded a high average similarity index of 0.9150, indicating consistent similarity metrics before and after therapy. The network is trained to learn patterns and similarities between pre- and post-therapy evaluations, in order to identify biomarkers indicative of therapy effectiveness. Notably, the Siamese Network’s architecture ensures that comparisons are made within the same feature space, allowing for more accurate assessments. The results of the study demonstrate promising findings, indicating different patterns in the output of the Siamese Network that correlate with improvements in symptoms of SCP post-DAT. Confirming these observations will require large, longitudinal studies but such findings would suggest that the Siamese Network could have utility as a biomarker in monitoring treatment responses for children with SCP who undergo DAT and offer them more objective as well as quantifiable manners of assessing therapeutic interventions. Great discrepancies in neuronal voltage perturbations, 7.9825 dB on average at the specific samples compared to the whole dataset (6.2838 dB), imply a noted deviation from resting activity. These findings indicate that Dolphin-Assisted Therapy activates particular brain regions specifically during the intervention.

Dolphin-Assisted Therapies (DAT) are alternative therapies aimed to reduce anxiety levels, stress relief and physical benefits. This paper is focused on measuring and analyzing dolphins brain activity when DAT is taking place in order to identify if there is any differences in female dolphin’s neuronal signal when it is interacting with control or intervention subjects, performing our research in Delfiniti, Ixtapa, Mexico facilities. We designed a wireless and portable electroencephalographic single-channel signal capture sensor to acquire and monitor the brain activity of a female bottle-nose dolphin. This EEG sensor was able to show that dolphin activity at rest is characterized by high spectral power at slow-frequencies bands. When the dolphin participated in DAT, a 23.53% increment in the 12–30 Hz frequency band was observed, but this only occurred for patients with some disease or disorder, given that 0.5–4 Hz band keeps it at 17.91% when there is a control patient. Regarding the fractal or Self-Affine Analysis, we found for all samples studied that at the beginning the dolphin’s brain activity behaved as a self-affine fractal described by a power-law until the fluctuations of voltage reached the crossovers, and after the crossovers these fluctuations left this scaling behavior. Hence, our findings validate the hypothesis that the participation in a DAT of a Patient with a certain disease or disorder modifies the usual behavior of a female bottle-nose dolphin.

This work is divided into three parts: (i) a methodology developed for building a 3D/ stereoscopic database, called 3D22${}^{MX}$, (ii) a software tool designed for degradation of 3D/stereoscopic images, and (iii) a psychophysical experiment carried out for a specific type of noise. The novelty of this work is to integrate these three parts precisely to provide not only professionals who design algorithms to estimate three-dimensional image quality but also those who wish to generate new image databases. For the development of the 3D/stereoscopic database, 15 indoor images and 5 outdoor ones were spatial-calibrated and lighted for different types of scenarios. Criteria calibration is different for indoor images with respect to outdoor images. The software tool to degrade 3D/stereoscopic images is designed from MatLab programming language since images captured in the first part are calculated for achieving several image degradation. Our program has ten different types of noises for degradation, such as white Gauss impulse, localvar, spatial correlation, salt & pepper, speckle, blur, contrast, jpeg, and j2k. Due to each type of noise containing up to five levels of degradation, in this proposal, a database of 20 images is required to design a tool for degrading and generating three-dimensional images ranging from all types of noise to yield psychophysical. Finally, there are applied specific criteria to carry out some psychophysical experiments with 3D/stereoscopic images. Moreover, we analyzed the methodology used to qualify and apply images to the j2k noise, explaining every degradation level for this noise.

In particular, certain types of disabilities such as trisomy 21 or Down Syndrome have both physical and alternative therapies. Among the alternative therapies are dolphin-assisted ones, which is a technique that consists in the interaction of the human being with dolphins (usually of the bottlenose species), where a therapist also intervenes; through which we try to improve the quality of life of both children and adults who suffer serious health problems, especially chronic diseases and psychological. In the present study, the Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal recorded during a session of Dolphin Therapy in children with Down Syndrome is evaluated. From the EEG of children diagnosed were built time series fluctuations, specifically of standard deviation ν (t, τ). The self-affinity of the time series ν (t, τ) (treated as interfaces in motion) is characterized by the scaling behavior of the structure functions $\sigma \propto \left( {\delta _t^H} \right)$, with H as the roughness exponent. It was found that the behavior of children with trisomy 21 is similar to the modeled by the Family-Vicsek scaling dynamic for a kinetic roughening of moving interface. Therefore it would possible to characterize and model the studied time series ν (t, τ) by using the tools from the theory of kinetic roughening such as the Langeving type $\frac{{\partial V}}{{{\partial _\tau }}} = \Phi \left( {\frac{{\partial V}}{{{\partial _\tau }}}} \right) + \eta \left( {t,\tau } \right) + F$ where F is the external force, η (t, τ) the noise, and Φ is the real form of the function.

Since many children with Down syndrome have difficulties with emotion recognition, there is a significant application gap in assistive technologies and affective computing that could be addressed. Conventional deep learning methods, which depend on the standard raster-scan flattening operation, achieve limited accuracy in this population because they fail to preserve spatial locality. In this paper, we propose a novel Hilbert space-filling curve optimization for neural network flattening layers, specifically designed not only to address these gaps in assistive technologies for this vulnerable group who are currently underserved by affective computing, but also to provide a framework for researchers seeking to fine-tune the architecture of artificial neural networks. Our approach retains spatial coherence using Hilbert indexing, implemented as flexible Keraslayers that are compatible with standard architectures such as VGG16 and ResNet50. A comprehensive analysis across multiple datasets reveals a 4% improvement in emotion recognition accuracy compared to Hilbert. The Hilbert optimization achieves 71% precision in Down syndrome emotion classification while reducing processing overhead by approximately 5%. By closing the emotion recognition gap with spatial-aware deep learning, our work contributes to more equitable AI for healthcare and advances the development of assistive technologies for neurodiverse populations, with near-term clinical utility in pediatrics and broader applications in affective computing.