Promoting Social Engagement With a Multi-Role Dancing Robot for In-Home Autism Care.

This work describes the design of real-time dance-based interaction with a humanoid robot, where the robot seeks to promote physical activity in children by taking on multiple roles as a dance partner. It acts as a leader by initiating dances but can also act as a follower by mimicking a child's dance movements. Dances in the leader role are produced by a sequence-to-sequence (S2S) Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network trained on children's music videos taken from YouTube. On the other hand, a music orchestration platform is implemented to generate background music in the follower mode as the robot mimics the child's poses. In doing so, we also incorporated the largely unexplored paradigm of learning-by-teaching by including multiple robot roles that allow the child to both learn from and teach to the robot. Our work is among the first to implement a largely autonomous, real-time full-body dance interaction with a bipedal humanoid robot that also explores the impact of the robot roles on child engagement. Importantly, we also incorporated in our design formal constructs taken from autism therapy, such as the least-to-most prompting hierarchy, reinforcements for positive behaviors, and a time delay to make behavioral observations. We implemented a multimodal child engagement model that encompasses both affective engagement (displayed through eye gaze focus and facial expressions) as well as task engagement (determined by the level of physical activity) to determine child engagement states. We then conducted a virtual exploratory user study to evaluate the impact of mixed robot roles on user engagement and found no statistically significant difference in the children's engagement in single-role and multiple-role interactions. While the children were observed to respond positively to both robot behaviors, they preferred the music-driven leader role over the movement-driven follower role, a result that can partly be attributed to the virtual nature of the study. Our findings support the utility of such a platform in practicing physical activity but indicate that further research is necessary to fully explore the impact of each robot role.

Toward an Automated Measure of Social Engagement for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder-A Personalized Computational Modeling Approach.

Social engagement is a key indicator of an individual's socio-emotional and cognitive states. For a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), this serves as an important factor in assessing the quality of the interactions and interventions. So far, qualitative measures of social engagement have been used extensively in research and in practice, but a reliable, objective, and quantitative measure is yet to be widely accepted and utilized. In this paper, we present our work on the development of a framework for the automated measurement of social engagement in children with ASD that can be utilized in real-world settings for the long-term clinical monitoring of a child's social behaviors as well as for the evaluation of the intervention methods being used. We present a computational modeling approach to derive the social engagement metric based on a user study with children between the ages of 4 and 12 years. The study was conducted within a child-robot interaction setting that targets sensory processing skills in children. We collected video, audio and motion-tracking data from the subjects and used them to generate personalized models of social engagement by training a multi-channel and multi-layer convolutional neural network. We then evaluated the performance of this network by comparing it with traditional classifiers and assessed its limitations, followed by discussions on the next steps toward finding a comprehensive and accurate metric for social engagement in ASD.

Corrigendum: Toward an Automated Measure of Social Engagement for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder-A Personalized Computational Modeling Approach.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/frobt.2020.00043.].

A Robotic Framework to Facilitate Sensory Experiences for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Preliminary Study.

The diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in children is commonly accompanied by a diagnosis of sensory processing disorders. Abnormalities are usually reported in multiple sensory processing domains, showing a higher prevalence of unusual responses, particularly to tactile, auditory and visual stimuli. This paper discusses a novel robot-based framework designed to target sensory difficulties faced by children with ASD in a controlled setting. The setup consists of a number of sensory stations, together with two different robotic agents that navigate the stations and interact with the stimuli. These stimuli are designed to resemble real world scenarios that form a common part of one's everyday experiences. Given the strong interest of children with ASD in technology in general and robots in particular, we attempt to utilize our robotic platform to demonstrate socially acceptable responses to the stimuli in an interactive, pedagogical setting that encourages the child's social, motor and vocal skills, while providing a diverse sensory experience. A preliminary user study was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed framework, with a total of 18 participants (5 with ASD and 13 typically developing) between the ages of 4 and 12 years. We derive a measure of social engagement, based on which we evaluate the effectiveness of the robots and sensory stations in order to identify key design features that can improve social engagement in children.

Interactions With an Empathetic Agent: Regulating Emotions and Improving Engagement in Autism.

Based on years of research establishing the utility of socially assistive robots (SARs) for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) intervention, such robots have now become popular tools, widely used in special education schools, autism care centers, and clinical settings. Most previous studies have explored the roles of SARs as instructors, learning aides, and social-skills trainers, focusing on the learning, language, and social impairments associated with ASD. This article addresses aspects of empathy and emotion regulation (ER) impairments, which are important underlying factors for many atypicalities manifested in ASD. We discuss the design of our robot's emotional capabilities, its emotion-based action library, and the algorithm it uses to regulate a user's emotions. In addition, we describe a user study that evaluates the ER capabilities of an emotionally expressive empathetic agent as well as its capability to prime higher social engagement in a user.

Sensing Technologies for Autism Spectrum Disorder Screening and Intervention.

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in sensing technologies that are relevant for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) screening and therapy. This disorder is characterized by difficulties in social communication, social interactions, and repetitive behaviors. It is diagnosed during the first three years of life. Early and intensive interventions have been shown to improve the developmental trajectory of the affected children. The earlier the diagnosis, the sooner the intervention therapy can begin, thus, making early diagnosis an important research goal. Technological innovations have tremendous potential to assist with early diagnosis and improve intervention programs. The need for careful and methodological evaluation of such emerging technologies becomes important in order to assist not only the therapists and clinicians in their selection of suitable tools, but to also guide the developers of the technologies in improving hardware and software. In this paper, we survey the literatures on sensing technologies for ASD and we categorize them into eye trackers, movement trackers, electrodermal activity monitors, tactile sensors, vocal prosody and speech detectors, and sleep quality assessment devices. We assess their effectiveness and study their limitations. We also examine the challenges faced by this growing field that need to be addressed before these technologies can perform up to their theoretical potential.