Towards an Interaction Stimulator Social Robot in the Parent-Child Interaction Therapy based on Real-time Speech Processing

摘要

Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) is a well established method used by psychologists to improve and to maintain a healthy and good parent-child relationship. PCIT requires trained and certified therapists, and the therapy sessions are conducted in a special room, but participants can also practice and later perform sessions in their homes with our without therapist supervision. In order to facilitate the therapy for the parents, here we present a possible approach to introduce social robotics into the PCIT therapy. We developed a behavior model to control a mobile robot and interact with both the parent and the child during a therapy session with the goal of stimulating interaction and communication between the parent and child. The behavior of this social robot depends on the contents of the conversation between the participants, which is analyzed in real-time. For speech analysis we have developed a framework for integrating various already available components to achieve real-time Speech-to-Text transcription, and also developed our own Natural Language Understanding (NLU) engine. The evaluation of the conversation is performed by this NLU engine, which was inspired by the Dyadic Parent-Child Interaction Coding System (DPICS) used in the PCIT therapy. Depending on the evaluation results, our mobile robot can exhibit different behaviors, which were inspired by EthoRobotics, such as approaching, getting attention, playing fetch with a toy. Besides constructing a functional real-time human conversation analysis system and a behavior model, we also performed preliminary HRI experiments with a real mobile robot controlled by the proposed model in real-time.