PRE2018 3 Group15

Group members

Name	Student ID
Sanne van den Aker	1258788
Leon Cavé	1240614
Robin van Tol	1246240
Heleen Fischer	1223688
Laura Barendsz	1245706

Users

For our main users we confined to children between aged 4 and 12 (this might be changed during the project) which is the age for primary school in the Netherlands who have autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Their needs will be defined as the needs they have of improving their social interactivity skills by means of education to help cope with their neurological disorder. As stated below children with ASD are more vulnerable to emotional and behavioural difficulties;

“Children with developmental disorders such as specific language impairment (SLI) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) appear to be more vulnerable to emotional and behavioural difficulties than typically developing children.” Wenche Andersen Hellanda, Turid Helland (2017) [12]

This is something to be considered in the education of children with ASD, however we will (for now) confine ourselves to the educational needs of children with ASD to help them increase their social skills by means of a robot. Many studies have already been done on the use of robots for educational purposes and many proposed methods proved an effective tool to improve the social skills of these children (see literature study). Some of these studies even stated the robots to be more effective at attracting attention while teaching [11]. Thus these robots seem to be in line with the needs of the main users when implemented correctly.

Approach

The goal of our project is to help young autistic children with their social behavior. We want to do this with the help of a robot Nao.

To determine the needs of the children a literature study will be performed. This study also includes a research about what is already done, so the state-of-the-art is explored.

With the information obtained a code for the robot will be written. This will be done in either in TiViPe or Choregraphe depending on the complexity of our project.

When the code of the robot is finished we will test it with autistic children and teachers of an elementary school. The results and feedback will be implemented after this. At the end of the project the robot will be demonstrated with all the adjustments mentioned by the children and teachers.

Planning

• Week 2:

• Introduction; Sanne
• Problem statement; Sanne & Laura
• User’s and RPC's; Leon
• Milestones; Robin
• Add planning and headings to the wiki; Robin
• State-of-the-art literature study; Everyone
• Write smart objectives; Heleen
• Approach; Laura

• Week 3:

• Literature study; Heleen & Laura
• Write scenarios; Robin & Leon
• Interview Emilia; Everyone
• Find people for the interview; Sanne

• Week 4:

• Literature study; Heleen & Laura
• Start programming; Robin & Leon
• Test plan; Sanne

• Week 5:

• Make a working version; Robin & Leon
• Test plan; Sanne, Heleen & Laura
• Update wiki; Heleen & Laura

• Week 6:

• User test + interview; Sanne, Leon & Robin
• Adjust code; Leon & Robin
• Process results; Heleen, Laura & Sanne

• Week 7:

• Process code feedback; Leon & Robin
• Write a conclusion and update wiki; Heleen & Laura
• Make presentation; Sanne

• Week 8:

• Provide presentation; Leon, Sanne & Heleen

Literature review

7. Bibi Huskens, Rianne Verschuur, Jan Gillesen, Robert Didden & Emilia Barakova (2013) Promoting question-asking in school-aged children with autism spectrum disorders: Effectiveness of a robot intervention compared to a human-trainer intervention, Developmental Neurorehabilitation, 16:5, 345-356, DOI: 10.3109/17518423.2012.739212

This research aimed at investigating applied behavior analysis (ABA)-based interventions either done by a human trainer or by a robot to promote self-initiated question asking in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In an ABA analysis it is studied how behaviour works in real life situations, with the goal to increase behaviour considered “good” and decrease behaviour that are harmful or affect learning. This research focused mainly on two research questions: (a) are an intervention conducted by a robot and an intervention conducted by a human trainer effective in promoting question-asking in children with ASD? and (b) which of these two interventions is more effective in promoting question-asking in children with ASD? The research in this article was done with the help of six children participants which were between 8-14 years old, had a ASD diagnosis, an IQ of above 80 on a standardized test and where not able to initiate a question after a statement of a trainer. A NAO robot was used and each child had two interventions by both a robot and a human trainer while being under video surveillance. The results of this article state that both robot and human-trainer ABA-based intervention is an effective tool that increased self-initiated question asking in children with ASD between baseline and the first intervention and was maintained during the follow up. The article states that no conclusions could be drawn with regard to the differential effectiveness of the robot or human-trainer interventions.

8. Felippe Sartoratoa, Leon Przybylowskia, Diana K. Sarko (2016) Improving therapeutic outcomes in autism spectrum disorders: Enhancing social communication and sensory processing through the use of interactive robots.

This research focuses at examining a range of socially interactive robots which are currently the most used for therapeutic purposes and their therapeutic effects. The researchers discussed how enhanced sensory processing and integration of social cues into these robots may underlie the benefits that these robots bring about. They state these robots and their interactions might provide therapeutic benefits by allowing the audiovisual cues in social interactions to be experienced in a simplified version of human interaction. The research focusses mainly on two parts: The deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), consisting of a sensory perception and neurobiology part, and the spectrum of socially-assistive robots, where multiple types of robots are examined. They conclude that ASD comes with perception impairments related to multisensory integration of more complex stimuli. Furthermore they state that ASD comes with several neurobiological overarching impairments such as one involving the mirror neuron system which facilitates imitation and social communication, or deficits in the amygdala which might underlie social cognition deficits. After examining the impairments that come with ASD the research focusses on the spectrum of available socially-assistive robots, where they investigate 4 types of robots: humanoid robots, cartoonish robots, animal robots and robots in robotic form. They conclude that humanoid robots were found to elicit enhanced generalization of social skills taught during therapy, however non humanoid robots attract the most attentional engagement and robots with a simple appearance increase levels of interaction and are more easily accepted by children with ASD. Next the research examined the application of neuroscience tools to improve the therapeutic value of the robots and concluded that the underlying mechanism behind the benefits of these robot interactions remains largely unknown and state that recent studies in their lab have begun to address this question. The research does not end with a general conclusion but with a written part about the access to social robot therapies and state that there is a lack of affordable, commercially available robots for in home use and that there is also a lack of longitudinal studies addressing following children’s process as they go through childhood.

9. Sang-Seok Yun, Hyuksoo Kim, JongSuk Choi, Sung-Kee Park (2015) A robot-assisted behavioral intervention system for children with autism spectrum disorders.

This research aims at examining the feasibility of a robot-assisted intervention system for the training of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) via human robot interaction (HRI) based on the discrete trial teaching (DTT) protocol. Their proposed robot architecture configures 4 modules: human perception, user input, the interaction manager and the robot effect, with which the robot can generate different training stimuli and can automatically cope with the child’s responses by using human recognition and interaction techniques. The article consists of 3 main parts: Robot system for autism treatment, experimental setup and results and discussion. In the robot system for autism treatment part they discussed their interaction architecture and its treatment protocols which focusses mainly on the social interaction skill of eye contact and reading emotion. Furthermore they discussed their robot automatic interaction system which involved sound, physical movement made by the robot, displayable content and even material reward. The experimental setup part goes into great detail about the setup used in the research, stating they used two different robots for their tests and a monitoring setup. Their results verify the effectiveness of behavioral intervention in autism treatment using a robot and they claim to be confident that the proposed system they used can be attributed to the positive effect of social skill training in children with ASD.

10. Jaishankar Bharatharaj, Loulin Huang, Christian Krägeloh, Mohan Rajesh Elara, Ahmed Al-Jumaily (2018) Social engagement of children with autism spectrum disorder in interaction with a parrot-inspired therapeutic robot.

This paper discusses a series of pilot studies in which ten participants (children with ASD) were to engage with a parrot inspired therapeutic robot. Hereby it was evaluated if these children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibited more social interaction when engaging with the robot compared to another human. The article states that parrots already have a widespread use in therapeutic sessions for example patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, the researches give this as a reason to design a parrot inspired therapeutic robot. The participants were gathered in a study room and three sets of outcomes were collected; one at baseline, one without human and robot interaction and one with robot or human interaction. Data was collected on 12 defined behaviours such as: looking at the person, going close to the person or touching the person. The study’s results indicate a significant improvement in children’s interaction abilities as opposed to sessions with human involvement and the 12 types of social interaction abilities monitored reported that the robot has the potential to act as a social robot to improve social interactions in children with ASD. The article ends with the notion that the sample group was small and the study was not conducted long-term and there were no follow ups, hereby stating they aim to address these limitations by increasing the scale and duration of their research.

11. Wing-Chee So⁎, Miranda Kit-Yi Wong, Wan-Yi Lam, Chun-Ho Cheng, Sin-Ying Ku,Ka-Yee Lam, Ying Huang, Wai-Leung Wong (2019) Who is a better teacher for children with autism? Comparison of learning outcomes between robot-based and human-based interventions in gestural production and recognition.

This study aims to compare the learning outcomes in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and intellectual disabilities from robot based interventions on gestural use versus the human based interventions. A intervention protocol was designed, implemented and tested on a test group of 23 children aged six to 12 divided randomly in two groups; one for human-based intervention and one for robot-based interaction. Two NAO (Aldebaran Robotics Company) robots were used and programmed to speak and/or produce 14 gestures. The treatments consisted of pretests, four training sessions (twice per week), an immediate posttest and a follow up posttests after two weeks. The learning outcomes in gestural production and recognition did not differ between the robot- and human-based intervention groups. The research however suggested that the children in the robot-based intervention group were more likely to establish eye contact with the teachers than those in the human-based intervention groups. To conclude the researchers state that there does not seem to be a difference between the likeliness of children with ASD who received human-based gestural training to recognize gestures and children who received robot-based gestural training.

State of the Art sources

• [1] J Ricks, Daniel & Colton, Mark. (2010). Trends and Considerations in Robot-Assisted Autism Therapy. Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. 4354 - 4359.

• [2] S. Shamsuddin et al., "Initial response of autistic children in human-robot interaction therapy with humanoid robot NAO," 2012 IEEE 8th International Colloquium on Signal Processing and its Applications, Melaka, 2012, pp. 188-193.

• [3] S. Shamsuddin, H. Yussof, L.I. Ismail, S.Mohamed, F.A. Hanapiah, N.I. ZahariInitial (2012) response in HRI-a case study on evaluation of child with autism spectrum disorder interacting with a humanoid robot Nao, Procedia Engineering, 41 (2012), pp. 1448-1455

• [4] S. Shamsuddin, H. Yussof, L. I. Ismail, S. Mohamed, F. A. Hanapiah, and N. I. Zahari, “Humanoid robot NAO interacting with autistic children of moderately impaired intelligence to augment communication skills,” inProcedia Engineering, 2012

• [5] Gijzen, T. (2016, February 9). Gratis app helpt mensen met autisme bij dagindeling. Retrieved from https://www.klik.org/Nieuws/Gratis_app_helpt_mensen_met_autisme_bij_dagindeling-160209130000

• [6] A. Amanatiadis, V. G. Kaburlasos, C. Dardani, S. Chatzichristofis (2017), Interactive social robots in special education, Proc. IEEE 7th Intl. Conf. on Consumer Electronics (ICCE), 210-213.

• [7] Barakova, E. I., Bajracharya, P., Willemsen, M. H. J., Lourens, T., & Huskens, B. (2015). Long-term LEGO therapy with humanoid robot for children with ASD. Expert Systems, 32(6), 698-709

• [8] Huskens, B., Palmen, A., Van der Werff, M., Lourens, T., & Barakova, E. (2015). Improving collaborative play between children with autism spectrum disorders and their siblings : the effectiveness of a robot-mediated intervention based on lego (R) therapy. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 45(11), 3746-3755.

• [9] van Straten, C. L. C., Smeekens, I., Barakova, E. I., Glennon, J., Buitelaar, J. K., & Chen, A. (2018). Effects of robots’ intonation and bodily appearance on robot-mediated communicative treatment outcomes for children with autism spectrum disorder. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 22(2), 379-390.

• [10] Diehl, J. J., Schmitt, L. M., Villano, M., & Crowell, C. R. (2012). The Clinical Use of Robots for Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Critical Review. Research in autism spectrum disorders, 6(1), 249-262.

• [11] Bibi Huskens, Rianne Verschuur, Jan Gillesen, Robert Didden & Emilia Barakova (2013) Promoting question-asking in school-aged children with autism spectrum disorders: Effectiveness of a robot intervention compared to a human-trainer intervention, Developmental Neurorehabilitation, 16:5, 345-356

• [12]

• [13]

• [14]

• [15]