Social skills training for children with autism spectrum disorder using a robotic behavioral intervention system

Abstract

We designed a robot system that assisted in behavioral intervention programs of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The eight-session intervention program was based on the discrete trial teaching protocol and focused on two basic social skills: eye contact and facial emotion recognition. The robotic interactions occurred in four modules: training element query, recognition of human activity, coping-mode selection, and follow-up action. Children with ASD who were between 4 and 7 years old and who had verbal IQ ≥ 60 were recruited and randomly assigned to the treatment group (TG, n = 8, 5.75 ± 0.89 years) or control group (CG, n = 7; 6.32 ± 1.23 years). The therapeutic robot facilitated the treatment intervention in the TG, and the human assistant facilitated the treatment intervention in the CG. The intervention procedures were identical in both groups. The primary outcome measures included parent-completed questionnaires, the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS), and frequency of eye contact, which was measured with the partial interval recording method. After completing treatment, the eye contact percentages were significantly increased in both groups. For facial emotion recognition, the percentages of correct answers were increased in similar patterns in both groups compared to baseline (P > 0.05), with no difference between the TG and CG (P > 0.05). The subjects' ability to play, general behavioral and emotional symptoms were significantly diminished after treatment (p < 0.05). These results showed that the robot-facilitated and human-facilitated behavioral interventions had similar positive effects on eye contact and facial emotion recognition, which suggested that robots are useful mediators of social skills training for children with ASD. Autism Res 2017,. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Autism Res 2017, 10: 1306-1323. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Collaborative Research Project: Developing and Testing a Robot-Assisted Intervention for Children With Autism

“…To date, nearly 30 robots were tested as remedial tools for ASD [e.g., : Labo-1 (Werry et al, 2001); Muu (Miyamoto et al, 2005), Robota (Billard et al, 2007), FACE (Pioggia et al, 2007), Keepon (Kozima et al, 2007), Aibo (Francois et al, 2009), IROMEC (Iacono et al, 2011), Charlie (Boccanfuso and O'Kane, 2011), NAO (Shamsuddin et al, 2012), Flobi (Damm et al, 2013); GIPY-1 (Giannopulu, 2013), Pleo (Kim et al, 2013), KASPAR (Wainer et al, 2014), Darwin-OP (Peng et al, 2014), Pabi (Dickstein-Fischer and Fischer, 2014), Zeno (Salvador et al, 2015), Jibo (Guizzo, 2015), Probo (Simut et al, 2016), Maria (Valadao et al, 2016), Sphero (Golestan et al, 2017), CARO (Yun et al, 2017), KiliRo (Bharatharaj et al, 2018), MINA (Ghorbandaei Pour et al, 2018), QTrobot (Costa et al, 2018), Milo (Chalmers, 2018), Leo (She et al, 2018), Daisy (Pliasa and Fachantidis, 2019), SAM (Lebersfeld et al, 2019), SPRITE (Clabaugh et al, 2019), Actroid-F (Yoshikawa et al, 2019) etc. ].…”

Technology-Facilitated Diagnosis and Treatment of Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Engineering Perspective

“…Ge et al [136] used Kinect to track the engagement level of the participant. Yun et al also used Kinect to track the activity of the participant when he/she is interacting with a social robot [137]. Kinect has also been used to track the movement patterns of the participations [29] and for self-modeling intervention for children with ASD [138].…”

Feasibility of autism‐focused public speech training using a simple virtual audience for autism spectrum disorder

“…The results in this study were generally in line with those of previous studies using simple robots in the treatment of ASD. Yun et al . reported that a simple humanoid robot could establish eye contact with individuals with ASD more frequently than a human therapist could.…”

“…The results in this study were generally in line with those of previous studies using simple robots in the treatment of ASD. Yun et al 56 reported that a simple humanoid robot could establish eye contact with individuals with ASD more frequently than a human therapist could. Moreover, a previous study argued that a robot that does not show human-like subtle expressions has an advantage in keeping individuals with ASD interested in communication 57 compared to human caregivers.…”