Therapeutic-assisted robot for children with autism

Detailed requirements for robots in autism therapy

“…Playing chase games with the child [8] or blowing bubbles when the child presses a button on the robot [9] are examples of such activities. Other activities involve asking the child to mimic the robot's actions [10,11], to identify the emotion a robot's face is displaying [11,13], or to look in the direction the robot points [14]. In some activities the child directly interacts with the robot by him/herself with a parent or clinician on hand to help encourage this interaction [13,14], while in other scenarios a therapist is "in-the-loop" and plays a more active part in the therapy [15,16].…”

“…Other activities involve asking the child to mimic the robot's actions [10,11], to identify the emotion a robot's face is displaying [11,13], or to look in the direction the robot points [14]. In some activities the child directly interacts with the robot by him/herself with a parent or clinician on hand to help encourage this interaction [13,14], while in other scenarios a therapist is "in-the-loop" and plays a more active part in the therapy [15,16]. A therapist in the loop could either remotely control the robot for enhanced robot-child interaction, or could be in the room with the child and robot so that the robot's presence enhances the therapist-child interaction.…”

“…Researchers at Yale have used a dinosaur robot, Pleo [5], and researchers in Japan have used a mechanical, machine-like robot, Infanoid, as well as a small, snowman-looking robot, Keepon [18]. Researchers at the University of Pisa have used a realistic robot, FACE [13], whereas researchers at the University of Sherbrook and Toyota have used less realistic humanoid robots in their studies, such as Tito and HOAP-3 [11,14].…”

Mimicking and Evaluating Human Motion to Improve the Imitation Skill of Children with Autism Through a Robot

“…Feil-Seifer and Mataric [6] proposed a control architecture for a supporting robot which interprets a child's activity and social behavior, and produces an appropriate reaction behavior for the child. Our research group [7] put forward a system in which a humanoid robot helps children with autism to get joint attention skills. To monitor the child's gaze in real time, a supervised Mixture Gaussian-based cluster method was used to detect the child's intention to complete a goaldirected task smoothly.…”

STB: Child-Dependent Sociable Trash Box

“…These types of robots would afford a significant role in society, which can be conveyed to any person for the purpose of utilizing them as well as collaborating with them [3,5,6,22]. Recent HumanRobot Interaction (HRI) research has indeed attempted to address the above problems through the field of sociable robotics [18,21,30].…”