Impacts of using a social robot to teach music to children with low-functioning autism

Abstract

This article endeavors to present the impact of conducting robot-assisted music-based intervention sessions for children with low-functioning (LF) autism. To this end, a drum/xylophone playing robot is used to teach basic concepts of how to play the instruments to four participants with LF autism during nine educational sessions. The main findings of this study are compared to similar studies conducted with children with high-functioning autism. Our main findings indicated that the stereotyped behaviors of all the subjects decreased during the course of the program with an approximate large Cohen’s d effect size. Moreover, the children showed some improvement in imitation, joint attention, and social skills from the Pre-Test to Post-Test. In addition, regarding music education, we indicated that while the children could not pass a test on the music notes or reading music phrases items because of their cognitive deficits, they showed acceptable improvements (with a large Cohen’s d effect size) in the Stambak Rhythm Reproduction Test, which means that some rhythm learning occurred for the LF participants. In addition, we indicated that parenting stress levels decreased during the program. This study presents some potential possibilities of performing robot-assisted interventions for children with LF autism.

Robot enhanced interventions and repetitive and stereotyped behaviors in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: a scoping review

“…The participants were children and young teens who had been diagnosed with ASD; the age range was 3-14 years and the mean age 7.27 years. In three studies, the researchers reported that the participants were low-functioning (Duquette et al, 2008;Shamsuddin et al, 2013;Taheri et al, 2021), while in one they were specifically described as high-functioning (Shamsuddin et al, 2012). In the study of Taheri et al (2018), the participants were a pair of high-and low-functioning fraternal twins (Taheri et al, 2018).…”

“…The ten studies included in the review took place in six countries on three continents. Three studies were carried out in Malaysia (Ismail et al, 2012;Shamsuddin et al, 2012;Shamsuddin et al, 2013), two in the USA (Srinivasan et al, 2015;Stanton et al, 2008) and Iran (Taheri et al, 2018;Taheri et al, 2021) and one in Canada (Duquette et al, 2008), Luxemburg (Costa et al, 2018) and Romania (David et al, 2020). The distribution indicates the worldwide research interest in studying the effect of REIs on RSBs in children with ASD.…”

“…Six different robots were used in the studies included in the review, the majority of which were anthropomorphic robots (Costa et al, 2018;David et al, 2020;Duquette et al, 2008;Ismail et al, 2012;Shamsuddin et al, 2012;Shamsuddin et al, 2013;Taheri et al, 2018;Taheri et al, 2021), while one study used a non-anthropomorphic animal-like robot (Stanton et al, 2008) and one a combination of an anthropomorphic and non-biomimetic mobile robot (Srinivasan et al, 2015). The robot most commonly used was the humanoid robot NAO, which was used in seven of the ten studies.…”

“…All of the studies were conducted in a controlled environment. Most of the study interventions took place in a room located either in a university (Taheri et al, 2018;Taheri et al, 2021) or in a center for children with ASD (Costa et al, 2018;David et al, 2020;Ismail et al, 2012;Shamsuddin et al, 2012;Shamsuddin et al, 2013). Ιn two of the ten studies, only the experimental room is mentioned, without its location (Duquette et al, 2008;Stanton et al, 2008), and one was conducted in the home environment (Srinivasan et al, 2015).…”

“…In most studies, the researchers used training involving imitation games (Costa et al, 2018;Srinivasan et al, 2015;Taheri et al, 2018;Taheri et al, 2021), including facial expressions, body movements, familiar actions with or without objects (Duquette et al, 2008), and interpersonal synchrony-based games (Srinivasan et al, 2015). Some researchers used simple modules of interaction with the robot, including verbal communications, simple physical actions, and interesting sounds (Ismail et al, 2012;Shamsuddin et al, 2012;Shamsuddin et al, 2013).…”