Lekbot: A talking and playing robot for children with disabilities

Abstract

This paper describes an ongoing project where we develop and \nevaluate a setup involving a communication board and a toy robot, \nwhich can communicate with each other via synthesized speech. The \npurpose is to provide children with communicative disabilities \nwith a toy that is fun and easy to use together with peers, with \nand without disabilities. When the child selects a symbol on the \ncommunication board, the board speaks and the robot responds. \nThis encourages the child to use language and learn to cooperate \nto reach a common goal. Throughout the project, three children \nwith cerebral palsy and their peers use the robot and provide \nfeedback for further development. The multimodal interaction with \nthe robot is video recorded and analyzed together with \nobservational data in activity diaries.\n