Social stories for autistic children told by the huggable robot probo

Abstract

Children with autism have difficulties with social interaction and prefer interaction with objects, such as com- puters and robots rather than with humans. Probo is a social robot platform with an expressive head to study human-robot interaction. The social robot is in this study used for Robot Assisted Therapy (RAT) where the robot tells Social Stories to autistic children. Social Story Telling (SST) is a known therapy for autism in book form and is now for the first time tested by a scoial robot able to express different emotions by its 20 motors in the head. This paper discusses the technological innovations required to make a useful therapeutic tool for social story telling. Preliminary tests with Probo have shown that SST with Probo is more effective than with a human reader.