Publicação
Affective robotics for socio-emotional development in children with autism spectrum disorders
| Resumo: | Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are a group of complex developmental disorders of the brain. Individuals affected by this disorder are characterized by repetitive patterns of behaviour, restricted activities or interests, and impairments in social communication. The use of robots had already been proven to encourage the promotion of social interaction and skills lacking in children with ASD. The main goal of this thesis is to study the influence of humanoid robots to develop socio-emotional skills in children with ASD. The investigation demonstrates the potential benefits a robotic tool provides to attract the attention of children with ASD, and therefore use that focus to develop further skills. The main focus of this thesis is divided into three topics. The first topic concerns the use of a robot to encourage learning appropriate physical social engagement, and to facilitate the ability to acquire knowledge about human body parts. The results show that the robot proved to be a useful tool, attracting the children’s attention and improving their knowledge about human body parts. The second topic regards the process of designing game scenarios to be used with children with ASD, targeting the promotion of emotion recognition skills. Three game scenarios were developed based on the expertise of professionals and they were successfully tested in pilot studies. Finally, the last topic presents two child-robot interaction studies with a large sample. They examine the use of a humanoid robot as a tool to teach recognition and labelling of emotions. The first study focuses on verbal and non-verbal communicative behaviours as measures to evaluate the social interaction and children interacting with the robot displayed more non-verbal behaviours indicating social engagement. The second study analyses the children’s attention patterns, and the children’s performance in the game scenarios previously designed. Along the sessions, the children increased their eye contact with the experimenter and in the study comparing the use of the robot with a traditional intervention, children who performed the game scenarios with the robot and the experimenter had a significantly better performance than the children who performed the game scenarios without the robot. The main conclusions of this research support that a humanoid robot is a useful tool to develop socio-emotional skills in the intervention of children with ASD, due to the engagement and positive learning outcome observed. |
|---|---|
| Autores principais: | Costa, Sandra Cristina Cunha |
| Assunto: | Autism spectrum disorders Socially assistive robots Human-robot interaction Socio-emotional skills development Perturbações do espectro do autismo Robôs socialmente assistivos Interação humano-robô Desenvolvimento competências sócio emocionais |
| Ano: | 2014 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | tese de doutoramento |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso aberto |
| Instituição associada: | Universidade do Minho |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho |
| Resumo: | Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are a group of complex developmental disorders of the brain. Individuals affected by this disorder are characterized by repetitive patterns of behaviour, restricted activities or interests, and impairments in social communication. The use of robots had already been proven to encourage the promotion of social interaction and skills lacking in children with ASD. The main goal of this thesis is to study the influence of humanoid robots to develop socio-emotional skills in children with ASD. The investigation demonstrates the potential benefits a robotic tool provides to attract the attention of children with ASD, and therefore use that focus to develop further skills. The main focus of this thesis is divided into three topics. The first topic concerns the use of a robot to encourage learning appropriate physical social engagement, and to facilitate the ability to acquire knowledge about human body parts. The results show that the robot proved to be a useful tool, attracting the children’s attention and improving their knowledge about human body parts. The second topic regards the process of designing game scenarios to be used with children with ASD, targeting the promotion of emotion recognition skills. Three game scenarios were developed based on the expertise of professionals and they were successfully tested in pilot studies. Finally, the last topic presents two child-robot interaction studies with a large sample. They examine the use of a humanoid robot as a tool to teach recognition and labelling of emotions. The first study focuses on verbal and non-verbal communicative behaviours as measures to evaluate the social interaction and children interacting with the robot displayed more non-verbal behaviours indicating social engagement. The second study analyses the children’s attention patterns, and the children’s performance in the game scenarios previously designed. Along the sessions, the children increased their eye contact with the experimenter and in the study comparing the use of the robot with a traditional intervention, children who performed the game scenarios with the robot and the experimenter had a significantly better performance than the children who performed the game scenarios without the robot. The main conclusions of this research support that a humanoid robot is a useful tool to develop socio-emotional skills in the intervention of children with ASD, due to the engagement and positive learning outcome observed. |
|---|