Cristina Costescu
Papers
16
Total Citations
764
H-Index
11
About
Cristina Costescu is a leading researcher in robot-enhanced therapy for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), with her work spanning clinical psychology, human-robot interaction, and autonomous systems. Her major contributions include developing and validating supervised autonomous robotic systems that move beyond traditional Wizard of Oz paradigms, enabling robots to independently adapt to children's social behaviors during therapy. Her 2017 paper on building such systems has garnered 138 citations, while her 2019 validation study has 81 citations. Costescu has demonstrated significant clinical impact, showing that robot-enhanced interventions can effectively teach turn-taking skills (61 citations) and joint attention (75 citations). Her meta-analysis (66 citations) provided the first comprehensive estimation of robot-enhanced psychotherapy's overall effects across populations. Notably, she co-created the DREAM dataset (57 citations), a landmark resource containing behavioral data from over 300 therapy sessions with 61 children with ASD. Her work also addresses ethical acceptability (60 citations) and perception of social robots, establishing her as a pioneer in translating robotic technologies into evidence-based, ethically sound therapeutic tools for neurodevelopmental disorders.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 5The Effects of Robot-Enhanced Psychotherapy: A Meta-Analysis66 citations · 2014
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