This paper presents an evaluation of the effectiveness of a new socially-assistive robot, Auti, in encouraging physical and verbal interactions in children with autism. It aims to encourage positive play behaviors such as gentle speaking and touching, with positive reinforcement through movement responses, and to discourage challenging behaviors, such as screaming or hitting through the removal of the reinforcing movements. This study evaluates the design by comparing a fully-interactive Auti to an active-only version, which does the same movements but does not respond to the child. Results from 18 participants indicate that the Interactive Auti does encourage positive behaviors more than the Active-only version. However, further design is needed around addressing problematic behaviors.
Rising obesity levels across the world are a major threat to health, well-being and the economy. Reducing the amount we eat is difficult. This is partly because consciously controlling our eating typically increases the amount we eat. The paper presents the MindFull tableware-a new design for tableware to help people to reduce portion sizes effectively and unconsciously. MindFull designs exploit a range of features of our sensory perception identified from psychological research literature. Initial experiments show encouraging results for the design and suggest several directions for future development, research and applications for the design findings.
<p>This thesis is an evaluation of, Auti, a new socially assistive robot designed by the author for children with autism. The study investigates whether Auti is effective at encouraging positive play interactions and reducing challenging play interactions through the application of Applied Behaviour Analysis principles. The toy aims to encourage positive play behaviours, such as gentle speaking and touching, using positive reinforcement by responding with movement. It aims to discourage challenging behaviours, such as screaming or hitting, through the removal of the reinforcing movements. The study evaluates the design by comparing how children with ASD play with a fully-interactive Auti to how they play with an active-only version which does the same movements but does not respond to the child. The study also looks at how children classify the toy and whether there is any indication that the skills they learn with Auti will be generalized to other areas. Results from 18 matched participants with confirmed ASD diagnoses indicate that the Interactive Auti does encourage positive behaviours more than the Active-only version, thus showing that it can be an effective medium for applying ABA principles of reinforcement. However, further design and research is needed around addressing challenging behaviours and increasing the range of the children’s behavioural responses.</p>
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