Robotics in Autism Intervention (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
This paper reviews the use of socially interactive robots to assist in the therapy of children with autism. The extent to which the robots were successful in helping the children in their social, emotional, and communication deficits was investigated. Child-robot interactions were scrutinized with respect to the different target behaviours that are to be elicited from a child during therapy. These behaviours were thoroughly examined with respect to a child's development needs. Most importantly, experimental data from the surveyed works were extracted and analyzed in terms of the target behaviours and how each robot was used during a therapy session to achieve these behaviours.
Robots and autistic children: a review
2020
In accordance with the advancement in robotics and the scholarly literature, the extents of utilizing robots for autistic children are widened and could be a promising method for individual with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) treatments, where the different form of robot (humanoid, non-humanoid, animal-like, toy, and kits) can be employed effectively as a support tool to augment the learning skills and rehabilitate of the individual with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Thus, the robots were exploited for ASD children in different aspects namely; modelling, teaching, and skills practicing; testing, highlighting and evaluating; providing feedback or encouragement; join Attention; eliciting social behaviours; emotion recognition and expression; imitation; vocalization; turn-taking; and diagnostic. The related literature published recently in journals and conferences is taken into account. In this paper, we review the use of robots that help in the therapy of individuals with Autism Spe...
Robot-assisted therapy for children with autism spectrum disorders
Refereed Workshop Conference on Interaction Design for Children: Children with Special Needs (IDC), 2008
Our research is the exploration of the social effects of human-robot interaction (HRI) on children with ASD, a population that has deficiencies in many types of social behavior. Computers and robots have been shown to be a catalyst for increased social interaction in children with ASD, yet that effect requires further study to be effectively employed as a therapeutic intervention.
Analysis of the use of a robot to improve social skills in children with autism spectrum disorder
Research on Biomedical Engineering, 2016
Introduction: Autism Spectrum Disorder is a set of developmental disorders that imply in poor social skills, lack of interest in activities and interaction with people. Treatments rely on teaching social skills and in such therapies robotics may offer aid. This work is a pilot study, which aims to show the development and usage of a ludic mobile robot for stimulating social skills in ASD children. Methods: A mobile robot with a special costume and a monitor to display multimedia contents was designed to interact with ASD children. A mediator controls the robot's movements in a room prepared for interactive sessions. Sessions are recorded to assess the following social skills: eye gazing, touching the robot and imitating the mediator. The interaction is evaluated using the Goal Attainment Scale and Likert scale. Ten children were evaluated (50% with ASD), using as inclusion criteria children with age 7-8, without use of medication, and without tendency to aggression or stereotyped movements. Results: It was observed that the ASD group touched the robot about twice more in average than the control group (CG). They also looked away and imitated the mediator in a quite similar way as the CG, and showed extra social skills (verbal and non-verbal communication). These results are considered an advance in terms of improvement of social skills in ASD children. Conclusions: Our studies indicate that the robot stimulated social skills in 4/5 of the ASD children, which shows that its concepts are useful to improve socialization and quality of life.
Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 2020
The present work is a collaborative research aimed at testing the effectiveness of the robot-assisted intervention administered in real clinical settings by real educators. Social robots dedicated to assisting persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are rarely used in clinics. In a collaborative effort to bridge the gap between innovation in research and clinical practice, a team of engineers, clinicians and researchers working in the field of psychology developed and tested a robot-assisted educational intervention for children with low-functioning ASD (N = 20) A total of 14 lessons targeting requesting and turn-taking were elaborated, based on the Pivotal Training Method and principles of Applied Analysis of Behavior. Results showed that sensory rewards provided by the robot elicited more positive reactions than verbal praises from humans. The robot was of greatest benefit to children with a low level of disability. The educators were quite enthusiastic about children's progress in learning basic psychosocial skills from interactions with the robot. The robot nonetheless failed to act as a social mediator, as more prosocial behaviors were observed in the control condition, where instead of interacting with the robot children played with a ball. We discuss how to program robots to the distinct needs of individuals with ASD, how to harness robots' likability in order to enhance social skill learning, and how to arrive at a consensus about the standards of excellence that need to be met in interdisciplinary co-creation research. Our intuition is that robotic assistance, obviously judged as to be positive by educators, may contribute to the dissemination of innovative evidence-based practice for individuals with ASD.
Brief review of robotics in low-functioning autism therapy
2020
In the last decade, numerous research studies showed that robots can be suitable assistants in the care and treatment of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Still, more investigation is required to fully assess the introduction of robotics assistants, as the majority of the studies was limited in numbers of participants and scope, e.g. by considering stand-alone interventions, High Functioning Autism (HFA) individuals only, and provided limited objective results, i.e. usually the success is evaluated via qualitative analysis of videos recorded during the interaction. In this paper, we present a brief review of the experience on integrating robotassisted therapy also in the treatment of children with Low-Functioning Autism (LFA) which is the most common case (>70%). Studies described here investigated the integration of a robot-assisted intervention in the training, and the results encourage the use of a robotic assistant also in LFA. Based on this experience, we suggest...
Robots for use in autism research
Annual review of biomedical engineering, 2012
Autism spectrum disorders are a group of lifelong disabilities that affect people's ability to communicate and to understand social cues. Research into applying robots as therapy tools has shown that robots seem to improve engagement and elicit novel social behaviors from people (particularly children and teenagers) with autism. Robot therapy for autism has been explored as one of the first application domains in the field of socially assistive robotics (SAR), which aims to develop robots that assist people with special needs through social interactions. In this review, we discuss the past decade's work in SAR systems designed for autism therapy by analyzing robot design decisions, human-robot interactions, and system evaluations. We conclude by discussing challenges and future trends for this young but rapidly developing research area.
Development of Socially Assistive Robots for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders
This paper describes the design and implementation of a robotic system for interaction with children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The system consists of a robot and supporting infrastructure, including a "smart room". The intent of this work is to explore and study the design of a therapeutic, minimally-restrictive environment that enables free-form human-human and human-robot interaction. Our primary design goals include: 1) using minimal structure with the participants in order to elicit natural behavior; 2) increasing a child's social interactions while utilizing minimal human-operated technology; and 3) facilitating human-robot interaction while requiring the child to wear no more than the minimum needed for effective signal detection.