Abstract-Utilizing a humanoid social robot to systematically teach music to children with autism has not received wide attention to date. In this study, a novel robot-assisted music-based scenario has been designed in order to: 1) teach fundamentals of music via a xylophone-/drum-player robot as a teacher assistant, and 2) improve social/cognitive skills through active music games in children with autism. The educational-therapeutic interventions were conducted in an elevensession case study program on three high-functioning and one low-functioning children with autism taking into consideration the children's, parents', and therapists' experience during the program. The results indicated that as a tool and facilitator, the NAO robot does have the ability to teach musical notes/rhythms to the participants with high-functioning autism. It was also observed that the severity of the participants' autism as well as the stress of the parents decreased somewhat during these sessions. Furthermore, noticeable improvements were seen in social/cognitive skills of all four participants; as well as the positive effect of this program on fine motor imitation skills of two subjects after the interventions. The progress reported from this preliminary exploratory study confirmed the potential benefits of using social robots and intelligent technologies as a facilitator in music-teaching and cognitive-rehabilitation. 1-IntroductionMusic has the power to influence humans and in particular children's emotions, moods, and feelings. Teaching music can help develop new or improve existing social, verbal/non-verbal communication skills in children [1][2][3]. Children who receive regular music education may have better movement, math and reading skills in comparison to their peers [4].Children with autism may have stereotyped behaviors and limited communication skills [5]. Music could be an effective way to involve them in rhythmic/non-verbal communication [1]. Nowadays, at least 12% of all treatment of ASD 1 s consist of music-based therapies [6].Music has often been used in therapeutic sessions with children with mental and behavioral disabilities [7]. There is ample evidence that shows either playing music during therapy sessions or teaching music to children with autism can significantly increase the impact of therapy sessions [8,9]. These studies have inspired researchers to use embodied music-based approaches to facilitate multisystem development of children [6]. In such studies or therapy sessions, an instrument is either played by a human or recorded music is played back in individual/group interventions [6,10]. Kalas [11], and Kim, Wigram, & Gold [2] showed improvement in joint attention, turn taking and eye contact of children with autism in (active) musicmaking interventions. Some studies have reported an acceptable decrease in stereotyped behaviors and self-injuries in ASDs after running music-based interventions [12,13]. Music therapy interventions have also been used to increase social [14,15] and emotional [16] skills...

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In this paper, the robot-assisted interventions for a pair of fraternal twins with autism, of whom one was high-functioning and the other low-functioning, are presented. Since many genetic and environmental factors were the same for both participants, the e ects of individual and group robotic games on these two children with high-and lowfunctioning autism were compared. The results indicated improvement in joint attention skills for both subjects. It was further observed that robot group games had the potential to improve social skills in the subject with high-functioning autism and to lower the amount of stereotyped and detrimental behaviors in the participant with low-functioning autism. The communication of both participants with each other improved, and their mother claimed she observed her children playing a meaningful game together at home for the rst time since their birth.

This article endeavors to present the impact of conducting robot-assisted music-based intervention sessions for children with low-functioning (LF) autism. To this end, a drum/xylophone playing robot is used to teach basic concepts of how to play the instruments to four participants with LF autism during nine educational sessions. The main findings of this study are compared to similar studies conducted with children with high-functioning autism. Our main findings indicated that the stereotyped behaviors of all the subjects decreased during the course of the program with an approximate large Cohen’s d effect size. Moreover, the children showed some improvement in imitation, joint attention, and social skills from the Pre-Test to Post-Test. In addition, regarding music education, we indicated that while the children could not pass a test on the music notes or reading music phrases items because of their cognitive deficits, they showed acceptable improvements (with a large Cohen’s d effect size) in the Stambak Rhythm Reproduction Test, which means that some rhythm learning occurred for the LF participants. In addition, we indicated that parenting stress levels decreased during the program. This study presents some potential possibilities of performing robot-assisted interventions for children with LF autism.

In this study, a modified efficient step-up boost converter is proposed. The proposed structure employs coupled-inductor and super-lift techniques to achieve high voltage gain. The super-lift stage absorbs the available energy in the leakage inductance of the coupled inductor, clamps the off-state voltage of the main switch, and reaches a moderate voltage gain. Moreover, the coupled-inductor technique offers high voltage gain, low off-state voltage for the main switch, and alleviates the reverse-recovery problem of the output diode. Hence, using these two techniques, the proposed converter achieves high step-up voltage gain and eliminates the drawbacks of the conventional boost converter. The proposed converter is analysed in details and a hardware prototype with the input voltage of 15 V, output voltage of 200 V and the nominal power of 100 W is utilised for the experimental investigation.

Autistic children are often impaired in initiating and responding to Joint Attention. In recent years, there has been an increase in the application of robots in diagnosis and treatment of autism. The purpose of the current research has been primarily to originate the proper therapeutic scenarios and to implement two interactive humanoid robots as therapy assistants in autism treatment in Iran. To this end, the humanoid robots were programmed and teleoperated via Microsoft Kinect Sensor and PhantomOmni Haptic Robot to elicit reactions consisting of imitation of humans by the humanoid robots and vice versa. In this paper, we elaborate on the therapeutic items that we have designed to improve joint attention and imitation in autistic children through using humanoid robots. Moreover, the fairly promising results of some interventions conducted in a pilot study on four autistic cases will be addressed and discussed. Our research target is to increase social interaction and involve autistic children in dyadic/triadic interactions which seems quite possible due to the findings of the pilot study conducted.i

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