A long-term study of children with autism playing with a robotic pet

Abstract

This paper presents a novel methodological approach of how to design, conduct and analyse robot-assisted play. This approach is inspired by nondirective play therapy. The experimenter participates in the experiments, but the child remains the main leader for play. Besides, beyond inspiration from non-directive play therapy, this approach enables the experimenter to regulate the interaction under specific conditions in order to guide the child or ask her questions about reasoning or affect related to the robot. This approach has been tested in a long-term study with six children with autism in a school setting. An autonomous robot with zoomorphic, dog-like appearance was used in the studies. The children’s progress was analyzed according to three dimensions, namely, Play, Reasoning and Affect. Results from the case-study evaluations have shown the capability of the method to meet each child’s needs and abilities. Children who mainly played solitarily progressively experienced basic imitation games with the experimenter. Children who proactively played socially progressively experienced higher levels of play and constructed more reasoning related to the robot. They also expressed some interest in the robot, including, on occasion, affect.Keywords:Human–Robot Interaction, Robot-Mediated Therapy, Robot-Assisted Play, Non-Directive Play Therapy, Assistive Technology, Autism, Children

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. ].…”

Measuring Engagement in Robot-Assisted Autism Therapy: A Cross-Cultural Study

“…De Silva et al (2009) proposed a therapeutic robot for children with autism, showing that children enjoyed interaction with the robot and that this approach enhanced their attention, based on an analysis of their eye-gaze. François et al (2009) used a robot-assisted play, with the game designed in conformity with individual needs and abilities of each child. The authors validated their approach with a group of children with autism that were engaged in a non-directed play with a pet robot (Aibo ERS-7), which can assess the children's progress across three dimensions: play, reasoning, and affect, showing that each child exhibited highly individual patterns of play.…”

A Long-Term Engagement with a Social Robot for Autism Therapy

“…Later François et al (2009) , presented a robot-mediated non-directive play therapy involving six children with autism and a dog-like Aibo robot in the UK-based school. The experiments were conducted once a week, with a maximum of ten sessions in total.…”

“…It is suggested that personalization can help sustain long-term user engagement when adapted to the user’s characteristics, preferences, and needs. Thus far, a handful of research studies ( François et al, 2009 ; Scassellati et al, 2018 ; Sandygulova et al, 2019 ) attempted to design an adaptive social scenario that focuses on many-sided interactive and engaging activities. This gap in research has become our core purpose with the belief that long-term commitment and individualized activities improve the social engagement of children with ASD.…”