Abstract
Socially assistive robotics (SAR) has the potential to close the gap between need and access to individualized, longitudinal support for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) that supplements and augments that of therapist, clinicians, and other caregivers. To this end, we developed a fully autonomous SAR system designed for month-long, in-home interventions with children with ASD. In this paper, we investigate a single case study with two siblings; one is typically developing and the other is affected by ASD. To better understand their help-seeking behaviors and engagement patterns, we define and analyze measures of participants’ attentiveness. Our analysis shows that there are strong correlations between attentiveness and challenge level for both participants. We discuss how attentiveness can be used to optimize challenge level, detect help-seeking behaviors, and improve robot feedback for individuals with diverse needs.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Baio, J., Wiggins, L., Christensen, D.L., Maenner, M.J., Daniels, J., Warren, Z., Kurzius-Spencer, M., Zahorodny, W., Rosenberg, C.R., White, T., et al.: Prevalence of autism spectrum disorder among children aged 8 years-autism and developmental disabilities monitoring network, 11 sites, united states, 2014. MMWR Surveill. Summ. 67(6), 1 (2018)
Clabaugh, C., Ragusa, G., Sha, F., Matarić, M.J.: Designing a socially assistive robot for personalized number concepts learning in preschool children. In: Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob), pp. 314–319. IEEE (2015)
Clabaugh, C., Ram, T.,  Matarić, M.J.: Estimating visual focus of attention in dyadic human-robot interaction for planar tasks. In: International Conference on Social Robotics (2015)
Clabaugh, C., Becerra, D., Deng, E., Ragusa, G., Matarić, M.J.: Month-long, in-home case study of a socially assistive robot for children with autism spectrum disorder. In: Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, pp. 87–88. ACM (2018)
Dautenhahn, K.: Robots as social actors: Aurora and the case of autism. In: Proceedings CT99, The Third International Cognitive Technology Conference, August, San Francisco, vol. 359, p. 374 (1999)
Feil-Seifer, D., Matarić, M.J.: Defining socially assistive robotics. In: 9th International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics, ICORR 2005, pp. 465–468. IEEE (2005)
Kim, E.S., Berkovits, L.D., Bernier, E.P., Leyzberg, D., Shic, F., Paul, R., Scassellati, B.: Social robots as embedded reinforcers of social behavior in children with autism. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 43(5), 1038–1049 (2013)
Lavelle, T.A., Weinstein, M.C., Newhouse, J.P., Munir, K., Kuhlthau, K.A., Prosser, L.A.: Economic burden of childhood autism spectrum disorders. Pediatrics 133(3), e520–e529 (2014)
Odom, S.L., Brown, W.H., Frey, T., Karasu, N., Lee Smith-Canter, L., Strain, P.S.: Evidence-based practices for young children with autism: contributions for single-subject design research. Focus Autism. Dev. Dis. 18(3), 166–175 (2003)
Ospina, M.B., Seida, J.K., Clark, B., Karkhaneh, M., Hartling, L., Tjosvold, L., Vandermeer, B., Smith, V.: Behavioural and developmental interventions for autism spectrum disorder: a clinical systematic review. PloS One 3(11), e3755 (2008)
Robins, B., Dautenhahn, K., Te Boekhorst, R., Billard, A.: Robotic assistants in therapy and education of children with autism: can a small humanoid robot help encourage social interaction skills? Univ. Access Inf. Soc. 4(2), 105–120 (2005)
Scassellati, B., Admoni, H., Matarić, M.: Robots for use in autism research. Annu. Rev. Biomed. Eng. 14, 275–294 (2012)
Short, E., Short, D., Fu, Y., Matarić, M.J.: Sprite: Stewart platform robot for interactive tabletop engagement, Tech. rep., Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California (2017)
Wechsler, D.: Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, 2nd edn. Psychological Corporation, San Antonio (1989)
White, S.W., Keonig, K., Scahill, L.: Social skills development in children with autism spectrum disorders: a review of the intervention research. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 37(10), 1858–1868 (2007)
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by National Science Foundation grant IIS-1139148.
Disclosure. Co-author Maja Matarić is co-founder and chief science officer of Embodied, Inc.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Clabaugh, C. et al. (2020). Month-Long, In-Home Socially Assistive Robot for Children with Diverse Needs. In: Xiao, J., Kröger, T., Khatib, O. (eds) Proceedings of the 2018 International Symposium on Experimental Robotics. ISER 2018. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33950-0_52
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33950-0_52
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-33949-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-33950-0
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)