This study investigates the potential of using the humanoid robot, NAO, as a playful tool for assessing the listening and speaking skills of seven hearing-impaired students who use cochlear implant(s) and sign language as their main communication modality. NAO does not have a human mouth and therefore, students cannot do lip-reading; we considered this to be a unique characteristic of the technology that can help make the assessment of listening and speaking skills efficient and accurate. Three game-like applications were designed and deployed on NAO for the purpose of this study. Results demonstrated how NAO was successfully used in this context. Our results, although preliminary, should encourage future research in the area of listening and speaking assessment for hearing impaired children, as well as speech enhancement via play with social robots.

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The paper presents a linear control system framework for design of technology-based games for pedagogical rehabilitation of children with special learning needs as a central component of the proposed cyber-physical system for inclusive education. The novelty is in explicitly addressing the issue of quantitatively estimating the improvement of games in the desired direction during the design process. An advantage of the proposed approach is its applicability to small groups of children playing diverse sets of games without loss of generalisability of the linear system's model assumptions. Statistically justified experimental results are reported as providing support to the main hypotheses of the present study.

The use of innovative technology in the field of Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) has gained significant attention nowadays. Despite being a promising research area, Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) have not been thoroughly studied and used in SLT. This paper makes two main contributions: firstly, providing a comprehensive review of existing research on the use of SARs to enhance communication skills in children and adolescents. Secondly, organizing the information into tables that categorize the interactive play scenarios described in the surveyed papers. The inclusion criteria for play scenarios in the tables are based only on their effectiveness for SLT proven by experimental findings. The data, systematically presented in a table format, allow readers to easily find relevant information based on various factors, such as disorder type, age, treatment technique, robot type, etc. The study concludes that the despite limited research on the use of social robots for children and adolescents with communication disorders (CD), promising outcomes have been reported. The authors discuss the methodological, technical, and ethical limitations related to the use of SARs for SLT in clinical or home environments, as well as the huge potential of conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a secondary assistive technology to facilitate speech and language interventions.