Long-term robot-enhanced intervention: social engagement, emotional and behavioral reactions of children with ASD in an imitation task

Background Research shows that the use of social robots in robot enhanced therapy for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has a lot of potential benefits. However only a few studies test the effectiveness of robot... [ view full abstract ]

Background Research shows that the use of social robots in robot enhanced therapy for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has a lot of potential benefits. However only a few studies test the effectiveness of robot enhanced intervention on the long term. Therefore, the objective of this study was to investigate social engagement, emotional and behavioral reactions of children with ASD during repeated intervention sessions of interactive games using the Nao humanoid robot. Methodology This study presents a series of 7 single subject experiments with ASD children aged between 3 and 5 years. The performances of the children regarding their levels of social engagement, emotions and reactions were measured both over robot enhanced sessions (8 sessions) and standard therapy sessions (8 sessions) using a single case experiment design (alternative treatments type). Results Most of the times robot enhanced sessions and standard therapy session are equally effective. However a few differences appeared mostly in the in eye contact and verbal utterances variables, where children were more interested in the robot partner during the entire intervention period. Also more positive emotions appeared when the robot was the interactional partner. As for the behavioral level, the presence of the robot in the task acts as an behavioral activator, so that both adaptive and maladaptive behaviors seems to appear more often in the robot condition compared to standard therapy condition. This work is part of a project which aims to develop supervised autonomous robots in order to be used in clinical practice.

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