Social robots as assistants for autism therapy in Iran: Research in progress

Taheri, Alireza; Alemi, Minoo; Meghdari, Ali; Pouretemad, Hamidreza; Basiri, N. Mahboob

doi:10.1109/icrom.2014.6990995

Cited by 33 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Cute characteristics of social robots would increase/facilitate effective engagement level, and obedience of children with autism toward teachers/therapists and robots [21] in the music-based interventions. Assistant robots have the catalytic role in appealing the education [43,44] and social/cognitive rehabilitation process of children [21] in friendly environments, and this could increase the attention span of the participants and their tendency to get deeply involved in the educational/treatment music tasks. Children receive the best education from those they like and not necessarily those with the best technical skills [45,46].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching Music to Children with Autism: A Social Robotics Challenge

Taheri¹,

Meghdari²,

Alemi³

et al. 2017

Scientia Iranica

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Abstract-Utilizing a humanoid social robot to systematically teach music to children with autism has not received wide attention to date. In this study, a novel robot-assisted music-based scenario has been designed in order to: 1) teach fundamentals of music via a xylophone-/drum-player robot as a teacher assistant, and 2) improve social/cognitive skills through active music games in children with autism. The educational-therapeutic interventions were conducted in an elevensession case study program on three high-functioning and one low-functioning children with autism taking into consideration the children's, parents', and therapists' experience during the program. The results indicated that as a tool and facilitator, the NAO robot does have the ability to teach musical notes/rhythms to the participants with high-functioning autism. It was also observed that the severity of the participants' autism as well as the stress of the parents decreased somewhat during these sessions. Furthermore, noticeable improvements were seen in social/cognitive skills of all four participants; as well as the positive effect of this program on fine motor imitation skills of two subjects after the interventions. The progress reported from this preliminary exploratory study confirmed the potential benefits of using social robots and intelligent technologies as a facilitator in music-teaching and cognitive-rehabilitation. 1-IntroductionMusic has the power to influence humans and in particular children's emotions, moods, and feelings. Teaching music can help develop new or improve existing social, verbal/non-verbal communication skills in children [1][2][3]. Children who receive regular music education may have better movement, math and reading skills in comparison to their peers [4].Children with autism may have stereotyped behaviors and limited communication skills [5]. Music could be an effective way to involve them in rhythmic/non-verbal communication [1]. Nowadays, at least 12% of all treatment of ASD 1 s consist of music-based therapies [6].Music has often been used in therapeutic sessions with children with mental and behavioral disabilities [7]. There is ample evidence that shows either playing music during therapy sessions or teaching music to children with autism can significantly increase the impact of therapy sessions [8,9]. These studies have inspired researchers to use embodied music-based approaches to facilitate multisystem development of children [6]. In such studies or therapy sessions, an instrument is either played by a human or recorded music is played back in individual/group interventions [6,10]. Kalas [11], and Kim, Wigram, & Gold [2] showed improvement in joint attention, turn taking and eye contact of children with autism in (active) musicmaking interventions. Some studies have reported an acceptable decrease in stereotyped behaviors and self-injuries in ASDs after running music-based interventions [12,13]. Music therapy interventions have also been used to increase social [14,15] and emotional [16] skills...

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confidence: 99%

Teaching Music to Children with Autism: A Social Robotics Challenge

Taheri¹,

Meghdari²,

Alemi³

et al. 2017

Scientia Iranica

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“…This was true even for a model with more complex kinematics (a three-dimensional model with non-spherical hip joints), although the produced walking was too slow. However, this problem did not have a serious con ict with the goals expected for the robot [25][26][27][28].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…These factors make it di cult to use a dynamic stability criterion. Fortunately, considering the goals expected for this robot [25][26][27][28][29], it does not need to walk too fast; thus, static stability has been used in this paper. Review of the construction of this robot (see Figure 1) shows a 6.09 cm o set at the hip.…”

Section: The Alice \Mina" Humanoid Robotmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this research, a GPG is developed for the humanoid robot \Alice" with the given Iranian name \Mina" [24], as shown in Figure 1. This robot has been used in autism treatment as a therapy assistant and in English as a Second Language (ESL) education [25][26][27][28]. Although this robot has the capability of walking, no walking pattern has been designed for it thus far.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Employing a Novel Gait Pattern Generator on a Social Humanoid Robot

2019

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This paper presents a novel Gait Pattern Generator (GPG) developed for the \Alice" social humanoid robot, which up to now lacked an appropriate walking pattern. Due to the limitations of this robot, the proposed gate pattern generator was formulated based on a nine-mass model to decrease the modeling errors and the inverse kinematics of the whole lower-body was solved in such a way that the robot remained statically stable during the movements. The main challenge of this work was to solve the inverse kinematics of a 7-link chain with 12 degrees of freedom. For this purpose, a new graphical-numerical technique has been provided using the de nition of the kinematic equations of the robot joints' Cartesian coordinates. This method resulted in a signi cant increase in the solution rate of calculations. Finally, a novel algorithm was developed for step-by-step displacement of the robot towards a desired destination in a two-dimensional space. Performance of the proposed gate pattern generator was evaluated both with a model of the robot in a MATLAB Simulink environment and in real experiments with the Alice humanoid robot.

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“…with a computer, cell phone, or other smart device). Therefore, it is essential for researchers, scholars, and users to clearly identify, understand, and consider these differences and ethical challenges so that they can benefit from the assistance of social robots as a powerful tool in providing modern and quality services to society (Taheri et al 2014. In this paper, the novel and multidisciplinary area of sociocognitive robotics, and the ethical challenges of emerging technologies are explored in in education, culture, entertainment, gaming, nursing, and therapy (Ghorbandaei Pour et al 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent Advances in Social & Cognitive Robotics and Imminent Ethical Challenges

Meghdari¹,

Alemi²

2018

Proceedings of the 10th International RAIS Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities (RAIS 2018)

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One of the main challenges in developing and applying modern technologies in our societies is the identification and consideration of ethical issues. With the dramatic growth of emerging technologies in today's societies, such as social robots, lifelike computer graphics (avatars), and virtual reality tools and haptic systems, the social complexity of these challenges is on the rise. To be prepared to face these challenges, researchers in engineering sciences and humanities are forming interdisciplinary research groups/activities and try to determine the rate of evolution as well as the effects of socio-cognitive systems on human interaction with intelligent tools and/or artificial agents. A growing number of social robotics researchers are seeking to create a framework to benefit from humanities, philosophy, sociology, and social neuroscience expertise and research. Likewise, growing trends of mutual collaboration among scholars in the field of human sciences, linguistics, and psychology with the robotics scientists are producing quite noticeable valuable results. This paper presents an overview of the novel and multidisciplinary area of socio-cognitive robotics, and further explores the possible ethical challenges of emerging technologies on education, culture, entertainment, gaming, nursing, and therapy. In addition, some key ethical features based on our past and present research experiences in a variety of areas in designing safe social robots are also presented.

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Social robots as assistants for autism therapy in Iran: Research in progress

Cited by 33 publications

References 14 publications

Teaching Music to Children with Autism: A Social Robotics Challenge

Teaching Music to Children with Autism: A Social Robotics Challenge

Employing a Novel Gait Pattern Generator on a Social Humanoid Robot

Recent Advances in Social & Cognitive Robotics and Imminent Ethical Challenges

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