Design of a robotic agent that measures smile and facing behavior of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Although socially assistive robots are popularly studied as a powerful tool in therapeutic activities for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), there are several challenges particularly in automation of the robot's behavior due to difficulties of sensing children's social behaviors by the robotic agent. We developed measurement methods to quantitatively measure children's social behaviors, such as smiling and facing behavior, by means of a wearable device and an image processing. Smiling, facing behavior and their synchrony are usually considered as important social behaviors that imply positive affect and engagement of the participant during the therapeutic intervention. Therefore, the proposed approach would contribute not only to develop the robotic agent which is capable of performing in response to social behaviors of children with ASD, but also to support an evidence-based therapeutic intervention. In this article, the measurement performance of the proposed methods were verified by experiments with ten children with ASD, and the relationship between their smile and facing behavior were analyzed.