Design of a Low-Cost Social Robot for Children With Complex Communication Needs1

摘要

Each year in the U.S., 8000–12,000 children are born with detectable levels of hearing loss in one or both ears (see Ref. [1], Centers for Disease Control). Research supported by the National Institutes of Health suggests that the most intensive period of speech and language development is during the first 3 years of life [2]. These children will also often fall behind their peers in language, cognitive, and social skills [2]. However, in recent years, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved cochlear implants for children beginning at the age of 12 months. A cochlear implant is an auditory stimulation device that bypasses damaged hair cells in the cochlea, which prevents the reception of sound, to send electrical current directly to the auditory nerve [3–5]. The postsurgery rehabilitation process often includes augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) techniques. For people with severe speech or language problems, AAC is a commonly used supplement for existing speech or in some cases even replaces nonfunctional speech [6]. Individuals with complex communication needs, such as hearing or speaking impairments, often rely on AAC, such as a computer programed communications board with graphic symbols and a voice output for communication [7].For children with cochlear implants, telerehabilitation may be a powerful tool for the recovery of hearing capacity. This typically consists of a child at home with the parent, and a clinician using real-time video streaming software to perform therapeutic interventions that consist of modeling and repeating specific words. Unfortunately, children may lose interest. Further, ensuring that these interventions are performed consistently is a challenge. Thus, there is a need for low-cost, easy-to-use systems capable of consistently and accurately providing this motivational interaction. A recent technological innovation that shows promise for such interactions is socially assistive robotics (SAR). SAR describes robots capable of providing hands-off, social assistance for medical and therapeutic outcomes [8–10]. SAR systems utilize social interaction to create close and effective interactions with humans for the purpose of giving assistance and achieving measureable progress in convalescence, rehabilitation, learning, and other domains. In the following, we discuss the development of an SAR system as a form of AAC for rehabilitation of children who have received cochlear implants, with particular attention to the hardware and software design and initial pilot testing.The overall goal is to develop a system capable of autonomous supervision of a home-based AAC intervention. In such an interaction, the robot faces the child and prompts the child with specific words (Fig. 1). The child then repeats those words. Once the robot has acknowledged the child's response, it moves on to a new verbalization.The design requirements imposed by the interaction on the robot include the ability to: (1) prompt the child using images and videos, (2) provide intervention-specific stimuli, (3) ensure that the child's voice can be heard, and (4) contingently guide the child through the interaction. Based on these requirements, we discuss the software and hardware design in Secs. 2.1 and 2.2.The robotic system consists of an off-the-shelf social robot used as the “base” of the system, and a smartphone used to display the robot's face and to provide the user with feedback. The robotic platform Rapiro2 is a commercially available programmable system with 12 degrees-of-freedom. It contains a Raspberry Pi board for communication, and an Arduino board for servo motor control. For our design, it was necessary to control the verbal and nonverbal gestures. Thus, we removed the head of the commercial version and created a custom 3D-printed shell capable of holding an Android-based smartphone (Fig. 1).During the interaction, the robot's motion is limited. The primary motion of interest is the movement of the lef