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Project

Research into the clinical use of social robots for children with autism spectrum disorders (IWT617)

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have a high prevalence and are declared an important and urgent public health concern. The profound impairment in social interaction is considered to be the most important deficit and the most challenging for treatment. An emerging research and therapeutic field is using social robots for encouraging social skills in children with ASD.
Technical advances have enabled robots to perform human-like functions and are deployed in Robot Assisted Therapies (RAT). Studies showed that children with ASD manifest a high motivation and engagement when robots are involved in treatment. Several studies declared that robots can be used as a social mediator between the child and the therapist and to elicit prosocial behaviors as joint attention and collaboration with peers. The idea behind using RAT for ASD children is that human behaviour, despite of being the best model for imitation and social skills development, is complex and subtle, so hardly possible to imitate by children with ASD. Robots on the other side are able to provide safe, simplified, predictable interactive environment that can be repeated in the same format until the learning process is realized, where the complexity of interaction can be controlled and gradually increased in order to respect different developmental levels of the children. Despite of these potential advantages, this is still a research field in its infancy. Most of the studies are engineer driven, so, focused on questions like what kind of robots can be used. But, there is a critical demand to answer
also questions like how a robot should be integrated for best clinical uses and for whom of the children with ASD, a RAT works the best.
Two different types goals will direct this research project to answer to these questions and assure advancements in this field. Firstly, a long term aim, which consists in building efficient and effective RATs for improving joint attention skills in children with ASD. The aim is not to replace the human therapist, but to use the robot as a facilitator, that mediates the interaction between the child and the human. This is in line with the goals of Flanders to become the leading region in improving the quality of care through innovation (Flanders Care mission statement). Secondly, in order to achieve this goal, the following short-term
objectives need to be reached:
(1) to investigate how children with ASD perceive a social robot and which are the effects of the child- robot interaction on their social behaviors;
(2) to examine if children with ASD perform similar with robotic agents compared as with human agents in tasks where the impairment of ASD children is accepted (gaze following and visual perspective taking tasks);
(3) to examine the impact of a social robot on a joint attention intervention for ASD children.
In order to go beyond the methodological limitations of this field, the studies will use a rigorous methodology, with adequate sample size, strong designs, inclusion criteria of the participants verified with reliable assessments methods and an evidence-based program as Applied Behavioral Analysis to integrate the robot. Pilot studies will be performed in order to test if the experimental task and the behaviors of the robot are well understood by the target group and, together with manually coding, objective assessment tools will be used for measuring the social behaviors of children with ASD in their interaction with the robot (i.e. eye-tracking and motion- capture systems). The robot used in these studies will be the social robot Probo, developed at VUB.
This research projects fits in the research goals of the Probo project to investigate humanrobot interaction and develop RAT for ASD children. This project is a joint effort between the Department of Clinical & Life Span Psychology and the Robotics Research Group of the VUB. There are also different international collaborations with Babes-Bolyai University (Romania), Twente Universiteit (Netherlands), Aldebaran Robotics (France).
Date:1 Jan 2013 →  14 Apr 2017
Keywords:clinical psychology
Disciplines:Clinical and counselling psychology not elsewhere classified, General psychology