Facial Automaton for Conveying Emotions as a Social Rehabilitation Tool for People with Autism

Abstract

individuals with autism. When viewing naturalistic social situations, people with autism demonstrate abnormal patterns of social visual pursuit consistent with reduced salience of eyes and increased salience of mouth, bodies and objects. In addition, individuals with autism use atypical strategies when performing such tasks, relying on individual pieces of the face rather than on the overall configuration. Alongside these perceptual anomalies, individuals with autism have deficits in conceiving other people's mental states or "mindblindness" [ The cognitive theory of mindblindness This often leads to typically inappropriate reactions or behaviours in a variety of social encounters. Recent studies have shown that individuals, particularly those with high functioning autism, can learn to cope with common social situations if they are made to enact possible scenarios they may encounter. By recalling appropriate modes of behavior and expressions in specific situations, they are able to react appropriately. There are now a number of highly structured therapeutic approaches based on emotion recognition and social skill training using photographs, drawings, videos or DVD-ROMs (for example Mind Reading, produced by Human Emotions, UK). Currently, these treatment approaches suggested the use of robotic systems in order to encourage children with autism to take initiative and to interact with the robotic tools. The use of the robotic technology aimed to help autistic subjects in everyday life began in 1976 with the work of Sylvia Weir and Ricky Emanuel They used a mobile turtle-like robot, LOGO, able to interact with a patient within a highly structured environment. More recently Franois Michaud They tested several robots, different in shape, color and behavior, in order to study the main characteristics that may capture the attention of people with autism. They obtained important insights for the comprehension of human-robot interaction in autism sustaining the robot hypothesis as useful. People with autism focus their attention on single details, but the interaction with a robot may allow an autistic subject to concentrate herself/himself on the limited number of communication modalities of the robot. In addition, while the stress of the learning with a teacher can be detrimental, the interaction with a robot, which often the young patients associate with media and/or cinema characters, can reduce the emotional pressure allowing the child to better learn from the environment. A more structured approach to the use of autonomous robots is AURORA (AUtonomous RObotic platform as a Remedial tool for children with Autism) [Dautenhahn 2002a, Dautenhahn 2002b]. AURORA represents the first systematic study on a therapeutic approach of robots in autism. People with autism are invited to interact in coordinated and synchronized social actions with the robots and the environment. In AURORA, behaviorbased architectures for the use of different robotic platforms such as mobile and humanoid robots (Robota developed by Aude Billard [Billard 2002]) were developed. Recently the development of emotional cognitive architectures allowed the interaction to be based on empathy, e.g. the KISMET [Breazeal 2001] project developed by Cynthia Breazeal at the Robotic Life Group of MIT Media Lab, INFANOID or KEEPON INFANOID is an upper-torso child-like robot, capable of pointing, grasping, and of expressing a variety of gestures, while KEEPON is a simple yellow snowman-like robot, both equipped by eye-contact and joint attention functions.