Can a robot be an efficient mediator in promoting dyadic activities among children with Autism Spectrum Disorders and children of Typical Development?

Collaborative Research Project: Developing and Testing a Robot-Assisted Intervention for Children With Autism

“…Although necessary as a starting point, these preliminary studies are unable to establish the effectiveness of robotic tools in clinical samples, according to the rules of clinical methodology (Kazdin, 1998). The best-established effect is the "likability" of robots (Begum et al, 2016): children with ASD show enthusiasm for robotic devices and willingly participate in games assisted by these devices (Pliasa and Fachantidis, 2019) To fit the needs of special needs educators, a collaborative approach was adopted. The idea of the robot in this project was born in 2011 in France when a father asked a team of young engineers from School of Industrial Biology at Cergy Pontoise to create games for his child with ASD.…”

“…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.].…”

“…Although necessary as a starting point, these preliminary studies are unable to establish the effectiveness of robotic tools in clinical samples, according to the rules of clinical methodology (Kazdin, 1998 ). The best-established effect is the “likability” of robots (Begum et al, 2016 ): children with ASD show enthusiasm for robotic devices and willingly participate in games assisted by these devices (Pliasa and Fachantidis, 2019 )…”

Cyber-Physical Systems for Pedagogical Rehabilitation from an Inclusive Education Perspective

“…Extensive research on pedagogical rehabilitation via technology is being carried out in the last decades (Dimitrova et al, 2019;Ghazali et al, 2020;Pliasa & Fachantidis, 2019;Tanaka et al, 2015;Van den Berk-Smeekens et al, 2020;Wainer et al, 2014). Some of the main drawbacks of the implemented methodological approaches are the following: small group of participants, diverse kinds of symptoms, different learning pace of each child, and demand for constant attention to the step-by-step learning process of the individual child on behalf of the teacher.…”

“…Game evaluation in special education is usually performed by professionals filling in questionnaires off-line for a subsequent qualitative analysis (Pliasa, & Fachantidis, 2019;Toh et al, 2016). Our teachers, instead, were asked to rate each game immediately after the child played the game.…”