Outcomes of a Robot-Assisted Social-Emotional Understanding Intervention for Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Marino, Flavia; Chilà, Paola; Sfrazzetto, Stefania Trusso; Carrozza, Cristina; Crimi, Ilaria; Failla, Chiara; Busa, Mario; Bernava, Giuseppe Massimo; Tartarisco, Gennaro; Vagni, David; Ruta, Liliana; Pioggia, Giovanni

doi:10.1007/s10803-019-03953-x

Cited by 70 publications

(104 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Social robot-based interventions have shown to improve emotion interpretation differentiation, and emotional perspective-taking skills in autistic children. Eventually, those improvements could be generalized to human and daily life social interactions (Scassellati et al, 2018;Marino et al, 2019). As social robots are accepted by autistics and equally perceived as social partners as humans, they give the opportunity to train social skills.…”

Section: Social Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electroencephalographic Correlate of Mexican Spanish Emotional Speech Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorder: To a Social Story and Robot-Based Intervention

Duville

Alonso-Valerdi

Ibarra-Zárate

2021

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Socio-emotional impairments are key symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorders. This work proposes to analyze the neuronal activity related to the discrimination of emotional prosodies in autistic children (aged 9 to 11-year-old) as follows. Firstly, a database for single words uttered in Mexican Spanish by males, females, and children will be created. Then, optimal acoustic features for emotion characterization will be extracted, followed of a cubic kernel function Support Vector Machine (SVM) in order to validate the speech corpus. As a result, human-specific acoustic properties of emotional voice signals will be identified. Secondly, those identified acoustic properties will be modified to synthesize the recorded human emotional voices. Thirdly, both human and synthesized utterances will be used to study the electroencephalographic correlate of affective prosody processing in typically developed and autistic children. Finally, and on the basis of the outcomes, synthesized voice-enhanced environments will be created to develop an intervention based on social-robot and Social StoryTM for autistic children to improve affective prosodies discrimination. This protocol has been registered at BioMed Central under the following number: ISRCTN18117434.

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Section: Social Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electroencephalographic Correlate of Mexican Spanish Emotional Speech Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorder: To a Social Story and Robot-Based Intervention

Duville

Alonso-Valerdi

Ibarra-Zárate

2021

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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“…Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is characterized by deficits in social communication and interaction, and by restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities and sensory abnormalities. These deficits can affect the person's ability to function properly at school, work, and other areas of life [13] and can result in the avoidance of social interaction [14][15][16]. Typical behaviors of children with ASD include little or inappropriate eye contact, no social smiling, limited facial expressions, or no gestures that enhance communication [16].…”

Section: Asd and Pivotal Response Treatmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effects of Long-Term Child–Robot Interaction on the Attention and the Engagement of Children with Autism

et al. 2020

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Using a social robot has been proven to have multiple benefits for the training of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, there is no clarity on the impact of the interaction quality between a child with ASD and a robot on the effectiveness of the therapy. Previous research showed that the use of a robot in Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT) could be an effective treatment component in diminishing ASD-related symptoms. Further analyzing the data from a randomized controlled trial of PRT treatment, we looked at the long-term effects of child–robot game interactions to see whether the interaction quality changes over time. The attention and the engagement of six children were measured through the observation of non-verbal behavior at three different stages in the treatment that took 20 sessions per child. The gaze and arm/hand behavior of the participants towards the robot, the game, and other present humans were observed. The analysis showed no significant decrease in the attention and the engagement of the children towards the robot and the game. However, the attention and engagement toward the parents of the children increased. We conclude that the main result of sustained attention and engagement with the robot is due to the personalization of the games to meet the specific needs of this user group. These specific needs are met through inclusion of variability to the level of development and personal choice of each participating child. We see the additional finding of increased attention towards the parents as especially positive since the children are expected to improve in human–human interaction as a result of this treatment.

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“…Among the newer technology-aided interventions to assist the learning of individuals with ASD are RMI. RMI can involve practitioners conducting therapeutic or instructional sessions with the aid of a social robot (e.g., Chung, 2018; Marino et al, 2019), which tend to have humanoid qualities (Kumazaki et al, 2019). Recently, researchers investigating the effects of RMI have reported promising results.…”

Section: High-tech At Use For Students With Asdmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recently, researchers investigating the effects of RMI have reported promising results. For instance, the use of RMI improved social-emotional skills among children with ASD (Marino et al, 2019). Similarly, the inclusion of a social robot in an intervention protocol improved social-communication skills such as eye contact and verbal initiations (Chung, 2018).…”

Section: High-tech At Use For Students With Asdmentioning

confidence: 99%

Technology-Aided Interventions for Individuals With Autism: Implications for Policy and Practice

Pham

Bennett

Zetina

2019

Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences

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Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by pervasive difficulties in reciprocal social-communication skills and restricted, repetitive interests and behaviors. Advances in assistive technology can potentially improve the functional capabilities of individuals with ASD. This article reviews current legislation and professional standards related to educating students with ASD with an emphasis on technology and evidence-based practices. In particular, the article summarizes technology-aided interventions (e.g., speech-generating devices, computer-assisted instruction, video-based instruction, virtual reality, and robot-mediated interventions) that focused on social-communication skills among individuals with ASD. Implications and future directions of technology-aided interventions are discussed.

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Outcomes of a Robot-Assisted Social-Emotional Understanding Intervention for Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Cited by 70 publications

References 44 publications

Electroencephalographic Correlate of Mexican Spanish Emotional Speech Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorder: To a Social Story and Robot-Based Intervention

Electroencephalographic Correlate of Mexican Spanish Emotional Speech Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorder: To a Social Story and Robot-Based Intervention

The Effects of Long-Term Child–Robot Interaction on the Attention and the Engagement of Children with Autism

Technology-Aided Interventions for Individuals With Autism: Implications for Policy and Practice

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