A Long-term Study of Robot-Assisted Therapy for Children with Severe Autism and ADHD

Abstract

Social robots are increasingly being used as a mediator between therapists and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). This paper describes an ongoing work that aims to target children with diverse forms of ASD that undergo long-term interventions with the robot. Additionally, this paper describes a novel behavior that was implemented to introduce and to practice a set of social behaviors used for greetings and non-verbal communications. We conducted a long-term study with a cohort of 15 children aged from 3 to 12 years old and this paper presents the preliminary results.