A study of auti

Abstract

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.

Mazi

“…SoundBeam [2] and Polipo [5]; or they target accessible instruments for musical expression and promotion of general well-being [3,25]. However, more recent studies on social skills development for children with autism focused on VR, AR, robots and computer vision in general [36,37,14,41]. This may be due to the increased availability of such tools and the fact that mild autistic individuals are more able to develop compensation strategies and transfer this type of interaction to real life situations.…”

“…As explained by Hornecker et al [11] central to the notion of shareability is the concept of entry and access points, where the former "invite and entice people into engagement" and the latter enables "users to join a group's activity, allowing perceptual and manipulative access and fluidity of sharing" [Ibid]. However, despite the potential benefit of TUIs for supporting play and communication [17] recent studies on functional social skills development target children with low support needs and Asperger and are particularly focused on VR, AR, robots and computer vision [37,36,41]. As children with autism, especially those in the lower end of the spectrum, have difficulty with abstraction of thoughts, we explore in this paper how physical interaction might enhance the possibility of sharing positive experiences between children.…”