Teaching Music to Children with Autism: A Social Robotics Challenge

Abstract

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...

Features of the application of art-therapeutic and gaming technology based on folk music in rehabilitation and socialization of children with health limitations

“…Music improves their social communication and motor skills," and this work "represents the possible role of rhythmic cueing for sensorimotor regulation in ASD individuals" [21]. Another group of researchers notes that "humanoid social robot systematically teaches music to children with autism to improve social/cognitive skills through active music games," and "noticeable improvements were seen in social/cognitive skills of all participants as well as in the positive effect of this program on fine motor imitation skills" [25].…”

Determining the Composition Functions of Persian Non-standard Sentences in Terminology using a Deep Learning Fuzzy Neural Network Model

“…One of the most fascinating branches of linguistics is known as computational linguistics, which dates back no longer than fifty years. In a definition provided by Dr. Meghdari, computational linguistics refers to an interdisciplinary field consisting of linguistics and computer science, serving to model natural language through statistical and rule-based techniques for machine use [16,17]. Computational linguistics initially covered only machine translation.…”

Arash: A social robot buddy to support children with cancer in a hospital environment

“…The Transportation Scale-Short Form (TS-SF) 25,26 and Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) questionnaire 27 were used for the first experiment, and the Godspeed questionnaire was used for the second experiment. [28][29][30] 1. The TS-SF was used to capture the experience of being immersed into the story by both the Audio book and Arash robot storytellers.…”