Robotic Interaction for Assistance to Autistic Children

Abstract

The rising cost of healthcare, the exponential growth of vulnerable population such as the sick and the aged, and the shortage of qualified professionals in recent times has led to logical alternatives of providing healthcare to patients. One of the major means of providing alternative care is the use of social robots. Several robotic examples have already been developed to interact and assist with autistic kids. This work is a contribution in the same domain. In this paper, we present our proposed human-robotic interaction system to assist autistic children. Our methodology makes use of multimodal fusion and fission as the basis for the interaction. The proposed solution is different from existing ones in the sense that the interaction between the autistic child and the robot is based on the context of the child. The robot is intended to be intelligent to adapt to the context of the autistic child.