A Participatory Design Process of a Robotic Tutor of Assistive Sign Language for Children with Autism

Abstract

We present the participatory design process of a robotic tutor of assistive sign language for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Robots have been used in autism therapy, and to teach sign language to neurotypical children. The application of teaching assistive sign language-the most common form of assistive and augmentative communication used by people with ASD-is novel. The robot's function is to prompt children to imitate the assistive signs that it performs. The robot was therefore co-designed to appeal to children with ASD, taking into account the characteristics of ASD during the design process: impaired language and communication, impaired social behavior, and narrow flexibility in daily activities. To accommodate these characteristics, a multidisciplinary team defined design guidelines specific to robots for children with ASD, which were followed in the participatory design process. With a pilot study where the robot prompted children to imitate nine assistive signs, we found support for the effectiveness of the design. The children successfully imitated the robot and kept their focus on it, as measured by their eye gaze. Children and their companions reported positive experiences with the robot, and companions evaluated it as potentially useful, suggesting that robotic devices could be used to teach assistive sign language to children with ASD.

Social Robot Co-Design Canvases: A Participatory Design Framework

“…In HRI, PD has been used to design robots for different types of target populations (e.g., older adults with depression [57] and dementia [64]) and for different interaction scenarios (e.g., a service robot for blind people [6], and robot-assisted therapy for children with autism [5,48]). Within this multitude of different contexts and targets, the approaches used in PD for HRI have been equally varied.…”

“…Similarly, PD was used by Axelsson et al to design a robotic tutor of sign language for children with autism, together with autism therapy providers and roboticists. The robot was tested in a user study by children with autism, where feedback on the design was provided by the children and their companions [5].…”

“…All of the aforementioned studies have in common the involvement of stakeholders such as domain experts or users as co-designers. All of the studies also mention workshops or group brainstorm sessions as methods for co-creation [5,6,48,57,64]. A few also mention using domainspecific frameworks or tools to facilitate the group sessions [48,64].…”

“…Our framework was first envisioned during the design process of a social robot to be used as an assistive sign language tutor for children with autism spectrum disorder [5]. Three roboticists and three domain experts of autism therapy-a speech therapist, a neuropsychologist, and a health care quality manager-took part in the PD process.…”

Smart design of intelligent companion toys for preschool children

“…Zheng et al (2019) introduces the design of a companion robot that has real-time multimodal computing. Axelsson et al (2019) present the design process of the robotic tutor that helps to teach sign language to children with autism spectrum disorder problems.…”