Premature infants are subject to numerous interventions ranging from a simple diaper change to surgery while residing in neonatal intensive care units. These neonates often suffer from pain, distress, and discomfort during the first weeks of their lives. Although pharmacological pain treatment often is available, it cannot always be applied to relieve a neonate from pain or discomfort. This paper describes a nonpharmacological solution, called Mimo, which provides comfort through mediation of a parent's physiological features to the distressed neonate via an intelligent pillow system embedded with sensing and actuating functions. We present the design, the implementation, and the evaluation of the prototype. Clinical tests at Máxima Medical Center in the Netherlands show that among the nine of ten infants who showed discomfort following diaper change, a shorter recovery time to baseline skin conductance analgesimeter values could be measured when the maternal heartbeat vibration in the Mimo was switched ON and in seven of these ten a shorter crying time was measured.

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Abstract-Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have marked impairments in social interaction. Imitation is a basic social interaction behavior, and mimicking as an element of imitation can be a diagnostic marker for autism and thus a skill that can be targeted by behavioral training. In a comparative study between children with and without autism (n=20), we designed a test that aims to find differences in mimicking expressiveness in a real-life setting. The Wii boxing game was chosen as an environment that can trigger expressiveness in children. Two measures were chosen to rate expressiveness: using observers and using a Microsoft Kinect 3-D camera in combination with motion analysis software. Results from the software tool show that the ASD-group is not influenced by the expressiveness of a confederate, while the control-group is. These results suggest that autistic children do not mimic expressiveness in gameplay and that this can be detected using a software tool.

This study investigates how young children between 4-6 years old interact with personified robots during a lying situation. To achieve this, a temptation resistance paradigm was used, in which children were instructed to not look at a toy (behind their back) while the instructor (a robot dog, a humanoid or a human) left the room. Results revealed that regardless of the type of communication partner, children's peeking behaviour was similar across the 3 conditions, while there was a tendency of lying more towards the robots. The majority of the children (98%) showed semantic leakage while telling a lie, and most of them (89%) lied and denied their peeking behaviour. Additionally, children generally gave more verbal responses to the robot dog and to the humanoid in comparison with the interaction with the human. Furthermore, the mean pitch of children differed between the robot conditions, i.e. the mean pitch was significantly lower in the robot dog condition in comparison with the humanoid condition. Finally, facial expression analysis showed that children generally appeared happier when they were interacting to the robot dog compared to the humanoid or human.