The term Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) covers conditions such as autism, childhood disintegrative disorder and Asperger syndrome. In this line, the World Health Organization (WHO) points that core symptoms of ASD are: a mixture of impaired capacity for reciprocal socio-communicative interaction and a restricted, stereotyped repetitive repertoire of interests and activities. Therefore, it is fundamental for a person with ASD to develop skills to communicate with his/her peers, share ideas, and express feelings. On those grounds, this chapter presents an intelligent ecosystem to support the development of social communication skills in children with ASD. The ecosystem uses a knowledge model that relies on ontologies, and defines the main elements that will be used for psychological intervention process. The different activities that will be carried out during the therapeutic intervention can be done using a robotic assistant or a Multi-Sensory Stimulation Room. This proposal has been tested with 47 children of regular schools, 9 specialists on ASD, and 36 children with ASD.
The World Health Organization (WHO) claims that 1 in 160 children present an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, the real estimation in low- and middle-income countries can be higher and currently is so far unknown. In many Latin American countries, it is essential to develop intelligent tools that can provide support during the psychological diagnosis and intervention of children with ASD. To this aim, this article presents an approach that models the most relevant elements of rehabilitation/educational activities for children with ASD and discuss how to support them through robotic assistants, mobile applications and Multi-Sensory Stimulation Environments (MSEE). The authors tested the proposed system in four different real scenarios: the perception of 47 children without ASD concerning the robotic assistant, the feasibility of using ontology-based reasoning to select therapeutic activities, the opinion of 9 experts on ASD regarding the MSSE and the perception of 36 children with ASD about the robotic assistant.
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