Social engagement of children with autism spectrum disorder in interaction with a parrot-inspired therapeutic robot

Date
2018-07-23
Authors
Huang, L
Bharatharaj, J
Krageloh, C
Elara, MR
Al-Jumaily, A
Supervisor
Item type
Journal Article
Degree name
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Elsevier
Abstract

This paper presents a series of results from a pilot study with ten participants to evaluate if children with autism spectrum disorder exhibit more social interaction interests when engaging with the parrot-inspired therapeutic robot, KiliRo, compared to with another human. Three sessions, each with different activities such as talking and singing that either the robot and a human encouraged the children to engage in, were conducted to monitor 12 types of social engagement behaviours in participants to compare the effects of engagement with a human and a parrot robot. The behaviours were recorded and analyzed using real-time video data of the interactions. The results indicate a positive influence of introducing the parrot robot to children on their social interaction. Also, the analyses revealed a significant difference in each of the session conducted based on the assessed 12 attributes, providing some indications for the potential benefits of human-robot interaction in therapeutic settings for children with autism spectrum disorder.

Description
Keywords
Autism spectrum disordersocial interactionhuman; Robot interactionparrot; Inspired robot; Therapeutic robot
Source
Procedia Computer Science, Volume 133, 2018, Pages 368-376
Rights statement
© 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the International Conference on Robotics and Smart Materials. 10.1016/j.procs.2018.07.045