Design of affective robot-assisted activity for children with autism spectrum disorders

Recent studies on autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have reported that positive emotions can be a good incentive for children with ASD to perform spontaneous positive social behaviors. Based on this findings, we propose an affective robot-assisted activity (ARAA) for fostering social interaction and communication skills among children with ASD by promoting their positive emotional responses through interaction with a robot. As it has been termed spectrum, every child has different social and affective characteristics that should be taken into account. However, due to difficulties in programming the robot's behavior, conventional RAA systems did not allow the therapist to customize the activity according to the characteristics of each individual. To tackle this problem, we developed a comprehensive framework of ARAA that consists of (i) a robot tele-operation method that allows a therapist to improvise a robot's behavior in real-time and (ii) a quantitative measurement method to describe social interaction within both behavioral and affective aspects.