Analysis of the use of a robot to improve social skills in children with autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

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.

Collaborative Research Project: Developing and Testing a Robot-Assisted Intervention for Children With Autism

“…Note, extant information on social mediator hypothesis mostly comes from pilot studies or technical reports, without control condition, descriptive and inferential statistics (Werry et al, 2001;Robins et al, 2009;Iacono et al, 2011;Shamsuddin et al, 2012) and/or without diagnostic method, exclusion and inclusion criteria, developmental age etc. (Feil Seifer and Mataric, 2009;Valadao et al, 2016). Further studies could better comply with the requirements of clinical methodology.…”

Social Robotic Systems in Autism Therapy: Survey and Design Considerations

“…Also, most of the robots developed for use in autism therapy are smaller than the children hence makes interaction a bit difficult. Self-presentation modes are virtually nonexistent in most robots used in autism therapy [17]. Before the robot-child interaction, robot self-presentation (i.e robot introducing itself) would help the child familiarize with the robot and also create a form of emotional bond.…”

“…In a study by Werry et al [5], children with ASD were made to interact with a robot and a non-animated toy; findings suggested that the children had more physical contacts, interactions and eye gazes with the robot as compared to the toy. [17].…”

“…In 2004, Robins et al [16] also investigated how a doll-like robot, ROBOTA, could be used to enhance shared attention, social skills and imitation among autistic children, their caregivers and other things in their environment. The research conducted by Valadão et al [17] sought to determine the impact of incorporating multimedia content in robots for children with autism. The researchers in the project developed the robot called MARIA and conducted a study with five ASD children and five without ASD (control group).…”

Effect of Image Resolution on Remote Photoplethysmography: Towards Emotion Detection in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…A new version of the robot, called N-MARIA (New-MARIA), with a better design, is shown in Figure 1. For more information about the robot see Valadão et al (2016).…”