The Role of a Robotic Mediator in Autism Therapy

1. Can Social Interaction Skills Be Taught by a Social Agent?
(The Role of a Robotic Mediator in Autism Therapy )
(Research Paper)

2. What is discussed
 What is Autism
 The AURORA Project
 Experiments:
 First pair, ---Child A , B and Robot
 Second pair, ---- Child C , D and Robot
 Third pair, ---- Child E , F and Robot
 Results
 Communicative Aspects of Interaction
 Comments on Paper

3. What is Autism??
 It is a Neurological disorder that is observable in early childhood and persists
throughout the lifespan
 According to National Autistic Society, a child autism shows impairment in
following key areas:
1. Social interaction
2. Language development
3. Eye Contact
4. Sensory Experiences

4. The AURORA Project
 The AURORA project was initiated in 1998.
 Its goal was to develop a robotic agent which would aid in the therapy of children
with autism.
 The AURORA project uses a single interactive robot and studies different scenarios
in order to characterize children's behavior when playing with the robot.
 The one-child-one-robot scenario is their basic approach, with the robot in the role
of a therapeutic teaching device, a tool that can be used to teach children with
autism basic social interaction skills.

5. Setup for Experiments
 The trial sessions took place in a room at the Radlett Lodge School, Hertfordshire,
United Kingdom.
 These took place in a room with a single door and a window.
 Six children participated in the trials, in three pairs.
 The children consisted of four who had had a previous experience with the robot,
and two who had not seen or interacted with the robot before
 There is a robot who performs a number of actions:
1. avoidance of obstacles including people,
2. following of a heat source
3. the generation of simple speech and phrases.

6. Child A and child B playing with the robot

7. Child C and child D playing with the robot

8. Child E and child F playing with the robot

9. Results
(Child A and B)
 The Child B and C had already encountered this trial before
 The pair A and B were Most Social
 The pair C and D were less Social than the previous pair
 The least Social were the E and F, none of them had already encountered the trial
before
 The Experiment results that robot needs to be improved for its interaction outside
the class room in order to analyze its Environment more Accurately

10. Communicative Aspects of Interaction
Local Structured Interactions
Global Structured Interactions
Meta Structured Interactions

11. Hints for Improvement
 The results would have been more clear if there would have been numerical figures
or statistics involved
 The research would have been more improved by encircling the children with
physical disorder and autism too
 if the aspect of communication also included communication with model based or
Goal based or learning based robotic agent, etc. then the research would be have
more improved