A Music-Therapy Robotic Platform for Children With Autism: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experience deficits in verbal and nonverbal communication skills including motor control, turn-taking, and emotion recognition. Innovative technology, such as socially assistive robots, has shown to be a viable method for Autism therapy. This paper presents a novel robot-based music-therapy platform for modeling and improving the social responses and behaviors of children with ASD. Our autonomous social interactive system consists of three modules. Module one provides an autonomous initiative positioning system for the robot, NAO, to properly localize and play the instrument (Xylophone) using the robot’s arms. Module two allows NAO to play customized songs composed by individuals. Module three provides a real-life music therapy experience to the users. We adopted Short-time Fourier Transform and Levenshtein distance to fulfill the design requirements: 1) “music detection” and 2) “smart scoring and feedback”, which allows NAO to understand music and provide additional practice and oral feedback to the users as applicable. We designed and implemented six Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) sessions including four intervention sessions. Nine children with ASD and seven Typically Developing participated in a total of fifty HRI experimental sessions. Using our platform, we collected and analyzed data on social behavioral changes and emotion recognition using Electrodermal Activity (EDA) signals. The results of our experiments demonstrate most of the participants were able to complete motor control tasks with 70% accuracy. Six out of the nine ASD participants showed stable turn-taking behavior when playing music. The results of automated emotion classification using Support Vector Machines illustrates that emotional arousal in the ASD group can be detected and well recognized via EDA bio-signals. In summary, the results of our data analyses, including emotion classification using EDA signals, indicate that the proposed robot-music based therapy platform is an attractive and promising assistive tool to facilitate the improvement of fine motor control and turn-taking skills in children with ASD.

Interventions through Art Therapy and Music Therapy in Autism Spectrum Disorder, ADHD, Language Disorders, and Learning Disabilities in Pediatric-Aged Children: A Systematic Review

“…Art therapy has also been demonstrated to be efficacious in a variety of contexts. For instance, improvements have been observed in symptomatology and behavior [ 51 ], communication, and cognitive and emotional skills [ 26 , 30 , 37 , 58 , 64 , 77 , 78 ].…”

Assisted Robots in Therapies for Children with Autism in Early Childhood

“…Searches based on the snowball technique were also carried out, reviewing the reference lists of articles already included for review in this work to verify the existence of additional non-emerging articles in databases. The age exclusion criterion was found to be the most relevant, eliminating some potential articles such as [ 7 , 8 , 9 , 17 , 19 , 20 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 28 , 29 , 32 , 35 ], which clearly showed the therapies performed, the robots used, and the relevant results provided.…”

“…These researchers explore everything from robot autonomy in non-invasive therapies to programming for specific skill improvements. Some authors better describe how therapy was focused or what its approach was, as in the case of [ 29 ] focussing on the development of a robotic music therapy platform, demonstrating the innovative application of non-conventional interventions, or [ 30 , 31 ] using social stories to promote social communication in children with ASD, using a humanoid robot to contribute to improving communication skills and social interaction.…”

Nonverbal Behavior of Service Robots in Social Interactions – A Survey on Recent Studies

“…Moving on, the studies also collected objective data through various methods. Video analysis was a prevalent technique in the studies of [38] and [62], where it was employed to scrutinize social interactions and initial reactions of children with autism. In [61] it was used to assess the adequacy and intensity of human responses, while [55] applied it for automatic personality prediction.…”