  Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are often associated with specific atypical
postural or motor behaviors, of which Stereotypical Motor Movements (SMMs) have
a specific visibility. While the identification and the quantification of SMM
patterns remain complex, its automation would provide support to accurate
tuning of the intervention in the therapy of autism. Therefore, it is essential
to develop automatic SMM detection systems in a real world setting, taking care
of strong inter-subject and intra-subject variability. Wireless accelerometer
sensing technology can provide a valid infrastructure for real-time SMM
detection, however such variability remains a problem also for machine learning
methods, in particular whenever handcrafted features extracted from
accelerometer signal are considered. Here, we propose to employ the deep
learning paradigm in order to learn discriminating features from multi-sensor
accelerometer signals. Our results provide preliminary evidence that feature
learning and transfer learning embedded in the deep architecture achieve higher
accurate SMM detectors in longitudinal scenarios.
