Robotic behavioral intervention to facilitate eye contact and reading emotions of children with autism spectrum disorders

Abstract

Social skills training of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is not an easy problem enough to typically spend a lot of time and repetitive efforts. As means of assistance, we propose and examine the feasibility of a robotic behavioral intervention system to facilitate social development of the children with ASD and relieve operational burden during training process. To this end, based on well-known behavioral treatment protocols, the robot system incorporates robotic stimulation design, recognition modules for human activities, and reinforcement procedure in the interaction scheme design. Using these configuration, it repeatedly perform a role of training eye contact and reading emotions targeted at preschoolers with a high functioning level in the planned training process. Through showing an advantage in a comparative analysis with control group taught by humans, we verified that the proposed system can contribute to evoke positive response of children with ASD and provide labor-saving effect on the clinical environment.