Lekbot: A talking and playing robot for children with disabilities

摘要

This paper describes an ongoing project where we develop and evaluate a setup involving a communication board and a toy robot, which can communicate with each other via synthesised speech. The purpose is to provide children with communicative disabilities with a toy that is fun and easy to use together with peers, with and without disabilities. When the child selects a symbol on the communication board, the board speaks and the robot responds. This encourages the child to use language and learn to cooperate to reach a common goal. Throughout the project, three children with cerebral palsy and their peers use the robot and provide feedback for further development. The multimodal interaction with the robot is video recorded and analysed together with observational data in activity diaries.