Interactive Therapy Approach Through Collaborative Physical Play Between a Socially Assistive Humanoid Robot and Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

摘要

This paper presents an exploratory study in which children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) interact with a NAO humanoid robot in an interactive football game scenario. The study was conducted during 4 sessions with three boys diagnosed with ASD. It observed improvements in therapeutic outcomes such as social interaction, communication, eye contact, joint attention and turn taking. Qualitative and quantitative analysis were conducted using various approaches such as video documenting, surveys and assessment scales. In order to establish the efficacy of the study children interacted with their typically developing peers and parents post intervention to relate skills learned in robot-human setting to human-human setting. The quantitative results gathered and analyzed from pre and post implementation showed an increased in execution and duration of target behaviors. Manual coding and qualitative analysis of videos also verified that the proposed robot mediated play setting demonstrated improvements in social development of children with ASD in areas of communicative competence, turn taking, social interaction and proxemics and eye contact.