Human-centred design methods : developing scenarios for robot assisted play informed by user panels and field trials

Original article can be found at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/ Copyright ElsevierThis article describes the user-centred development of play scenarios for robot assisted play, as part of the multidisciplinary IROMEC1 project that develops a novel robotic toy for children with special needs. The project investigates how robotic toys can become social mediators, encouraging children with special needs to discover a range of play styles, from solitary to collaborative play (with peers, carers/teachers, parents, etc.). This article explains the developmental process of constructing relevant play scenarios for children with different special needs. Results are presented from consultation with panel of experts (therapists, teachers, parents) who advised on the play needs for the various target user groups and who helped investigate how robotic toys could be used as a play tool to assist in the children’s development. Examples from experimental investigations are provided which have informed the development of scenarios throughout the design process. We conclude by pointing out the potential benefit of this work to a variety of research projects and applications involving human–robot interactions.Peer reviewe

Proprioceptive and Kinematic Profiles for Customized Human‐ Robot Interaction for People Suffering from Autism

In this chapter, we presented a method to define individual profiles in order to develop a new personalized robot‐based social interaction for individual with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) with the hypothesis that hyporeactivity to visual motion and an overreliance on proprioceptive information would be linked to difficulties in integrating social cues and in engaging in successful interactions. We succeed to form three groups among our 19 participants (children, teenagers, and adults with ASD), describing each participant\u27s response to visual and proprioceptive inputs. We conducted a first experiment to present the robot Nao as a social companion and to avoid fear or stress toward the robot in future experiment. No direct link between the behavior of the participants toward the robot and their proprioceptive and visual profiles was observed. Still, we found encouraging results going in the direction of our hypothesis. In addition, almost all of our participants showed great interest to Nao. Defining such individual profiles prior to social interactions with a robot could provide promising strategies for designing successful and adapted human‐robot interaction (HRI) for individuals with ASD

Applications of Robotics for Autism Spectrum Disorder: a Scoping Review

Robotic therapies are receiving growing interest in the autism field, especially for the improvement of social skills of children, enhancing traditional human interventions. In this work, we conduct a scoping review of the literature in robotics for autism, providing the largest review on this field from the last five years. Our work underlines the need to better characterize participants and to increase the sample size. It is also important to develop homogeneous training protocols to analyse and compare the results. Nevertheless, 7 out of the 10 Randomized control trials reported a significant impact of robotic therapy. Overall, robot autonomy, adaptability and personalization as well as more standardized outcome measures were pointed as the most critical issues to address in future research

Developing a protocol and experimental setup for using a humanoid robot to assist children with autism to develop visual perspective taking skills

Visual Perspective Taking (VPT) is the ability to see the world from another person's perspective, taking into account what they see and how they see it, drawing upon both spatial and social information. Children with autism often find it difficult to understand that other people might have perspectives, viewpoints, beliefs and knowledge that are different from their own, which is a fundamental aspect of VPT. In this research we aimed to develop a methodology to assist children with autism develop their VPT skills using a humanoid robot and present results from our first long-term pilot study. The games we devised were implemented with the Kaspar robot and, to our knowledge, this is the first attempt to improve the VPT skills of children with autism through playing and interacting with a humanoid robot. We describe in detail the standard pre- and post- assessments that we performed with the children in order to measure their progress and also the inclusion criteria derived from the results for future studies in this field. Our findings suggest that some children may benefit from this approach of learning about VPT, which shows that this approach merits further investigation.Peer reviewe

Preliminary test of the potential of contact with dogs to elicit spontaneous imitation in children and adults with severe autism spectrum disorder

Importance: Finding strategies to enhance imitation skills in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is of major clinical relevance. Objective: To evaluate whether contact with dogs may be a useful approach to elicit spontaneous imitation in people with ASD. Design: Participants completed a spontaneous imitation task under three experimental conditions: after a free-play interaction with a live dog, after a free-play interaction with a robotic dog, and after a waiting period that involved no stimuli. Participants: Ten children and 15 adults diagnosed with severe ASD. Outcomes and measures: Imitation ratio, imitation accuracy, and indicators of social motivation. Results: Children appeared more motivated and engaged more frequently in spontaneous imitation in the live dog condition than in the other conditions. No differences between conditions were found for adults for imitation or social motivation. However, correlations suggested a possible trend for adults in time spent engaging with the live dog before testing and in increased imitation frequency. Conclusions and relevance: The results are preliminary and do not indicate the utility of integrating (live) dogs into interventions aimed at promoting social motivation and enhancing imitation skills in people with ASD. However, they suggest that doing so holds promise. Larger scale studies are now needed. What this article adds: This research calls for occupational therapy practitioners' attention to the potential benefits that may derive from using dogs to promote spontaneous imitation, and increase imitation performance, in people with ASD, particularly children.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Dialogue Design for a Robot-Based Face-Mirroring Game to Engage Autistic Children with Emotional Expressions

We present design strategies for Human Robot Interaction for school-aged autistic children with limited receptive language. Applying these strategies to the DE-ENIGMA project (large EU project addressing emotion recognition in autistic children) supported development of a new activity for in facial expression imitation whereby the robot imitates the child’s face to encourage the child to notice facial expressions in a play-based game. A usability case study with 15 typically-developing children aged 4–6 at an English-language school in the Netherlands was performed to observe the feasibility of the setup and make design revisions before exposing the robot to autistic children

A comparison between a person and a robot in the attention, imitation, and repetitive and stereotypical behaviors of children with autism spectrum disorder.

The aim of the present study was to assess the usefulness of QT, a socially assistive robot, in interventions with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by assessing children’s attention, imitation, and presence of repetitive and stereotyped behaviors. Fifteen children diagnosed with ASD, aged from 4 to 14 years participated in two short interactions, one with a person and one with QT robot. Statistical analyses revealed that children directed more attention towards the robot than to the person, imitated the robot as much as the person, and engaged in fewer repetitive or stereotyped behaviors with the robot than with the person. These results support previous research demonstrating the usefulness of robots in interventions with children with ASD and provide new evidence to the usefulness of robots in reducing repetitive and stereotyped behaviors in children with ASD, which can affect children’s learning

Robots and autistic children: a review

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 Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The articles on using robots for autistic children rehabilitation and education which reported results of experiments on a number of participants were implicated. After looking in digital libraries under this criteria, and excluding non-related, and duplicated studies, 39 studies have been found. The findings were focused mainly on the social communication skills of autistic children and how the extent of the robots mitigate their stereotyped behaviours. Deeper research is required in this area to cover all applications of robotic on autistic children in order to design feasible and low-cost robots that ensure provide high validity