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.