A Preliminary Study on Effectiveness of a Standardized Multi-Robot Therapy for Improvement in Collaborative Multi-Human Interaction of Children With ASD

Abstract

This research article presents a preliminary longitudinal study to check the improvement in multi-human communication of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) using a standardized multirobot therapy. The research is based on a 3 step framework: 1) Human-Human Interaction, Stage-1 (HHI-S1), 2) Human-Robot Interaction, Stage-2 (HRI-S2), and 3) Human-Human Interaction, Stage-3 (HHI-S3). All three stages of the therapy consist of two command sets: 1) Controls commands and 2) Evaluation commands (auditory commands, visual commands, and combination of both). The concept of multiple robots is introduced to help multi-human communication and discourage isolation in ASD children. The joint attention of an ASD child is improved by the robotic therapy in stage 2 considering it as a key parameter for a multi-human communication scenario. The improvement in joint attention results in better command following in a triad multi-human communication scenario in stage 3 as compared to stage 1. The proposed intervention has been tested on 8 ASD subjects with 10 sessions over a period of two and a half months (10 weeks). Each session of human-human interaction (stage 1 and 3) consisted of 14 cues whereas 18 cues were presented by each robot for human-robot interaction (stage 2). The results indicate an overall 86% improvement in the social communication skills of ASD children in case of a multi-human scenario. Validation of results and effectiveness of the therapy has been further accomplished through the use of the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS) score. INDEX TERMS Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Multi-robots, Human-robot interaction, Robotic therapy.

Robot facilitated rehabilitation of children with autism spectrum disorder: A 10 year scoping review

“…Further, in a multistage human‐robot‐human experiment (Ali, Mehmood, Khan, et al, 2020), Robots have promoted increased interaction between ASD individuals and humans. Therefore Robots can overcome the limited availability of vocational trainers to engage in laborious and rigorous therapeutic engagements for ASD children to build skills.…”

“…Similarly, Ali, Mehmood, Ayaz, et al (2020) evaluated the role of Robots in performing reinforcer assessments. In the following study, Ali, Mehmood, Khan, et al (2020) targeted improvements in joint attention and eye‐contact skills, thereby promoting ASD children's interaction with a human. Ali et al (2019) extended their findings by targeting improvement in children's joint attention and imitation skills.…”

“…The review reported limitations such as small sample size (Ali et al, 2019; Bekele et al, 2014; Boucenna et al, 2014; Del Coco et al, 2018; Esubalew et al, 2012; Feng et al, 2017; Goodrich et al, 2012; Kaboski et al, 2015; Kumazaki, Muramatsu, Yoshikawa, Matsumoto, et al, 2019; So, Wong, Lam, Lam, et al, 2018; Taheri et al, 2018, 2019; Valadão et al, 2016; Warren et al, 2015; Yun et al, 2017; Zheng et al, 2015; Zheng et al, 2017; Zheng et al, 2020), limited and brief experiment sessions and a lack of opportunities to generalize skills acquired by ASD children post RMI (Huijnen et al, 2019; Saadatzi et al, 2018; So, Wong, Lam, Cheng, et al, 2018; Taheri et al, 2018; Zheng et al, 2020) with lasting effect (Kaboski et al, 2015). In addition, studies reported trust deficits (Ali, Mehmood, Ayaz, et al, 2020; Ali, Mehmood, Khan, et al, 2020), ethics, privacy, and data protection (Cao et al, 2019; Coeckelbergh et al, 2016; Sandygulova et al, 2019) issues, lack of trials (Mengoni et al, 2017) and, personalized engagement and intervention (Huijnen et al, 2016) challenges with RMI.…”

“…Future research should include pilots (Huijnen et al, 2017, 2019) with statistically significant participants that participate in trials for an extended period in settings familiar to the participants, such as schools or daycare facilities (Huskens et al, 2015; Kaboski et al, 2015; Simut et al, 2016; So et al, 2019, 2020; So, Wong, Lam, Lam, et al, 2018; Warren et al, 2015). The studies can include RCT‐based pre‐post design, CGs (Ali, Mehmood, Khan, et al, 2020) or clinical waiting list controls (Robins & Dautenhahn, 2014), to compare outcomes of SHT (So, Wong, Lam, Cheng, et al, 2018; So, Wong, Lam, Lam, et al, 2018) and RMI (Ali et al, 2019; Cao et al, 2019; So, Wong, Lam, Cheng, et al, 2018) and analyse advancements in joint attention skills (Zheng et al, 2017) in ASD children. Researchers can focus on a user‐centered approach (Syrdal et al, 2020) capturing the perspectives and experiences of caregivers, therapists, educators, providers, and payors, with a vast array of Robots (Goodrich et al, 2012) controlled with user interface technologies (Zheng et al, 2015, 2020).…”

An Experimental Trial: Multi-Robot Therapy for Categorization of Autism Level Using Hidden Markov Model

“…Especially under the current COVID-19 situation, the current research trends are focusing online for technology-based therapies. For this purpose, robotic therapies including multi-robot therapeutic interventions are becoming popular among technology-based applications for children with ASD (Ali et al., 2019; Ali, Mehmood, Ayaz, et al., 2020; Ali, Mehmood, Khan, et al., 2020; Mehmood et al., 2019, 2020). This is because ASD children are more inclined towards robots because of their predictive behavior (Begum et al., 2016).…”