Design of a therapeutic robot for interacting with autistic children through interpersonal touch

Previous researches, in the field of robot assisted therapy, suggested that communications with robots encourage autistic children to have more positive reaction to the robots´ behavior, and this seems to be a reliable approach to improve the social interaction and communication skills of autistic children. However, most of the researches focused on improving only some limited aspects of the autistic children´s social communication problems and it is difficult to evaluate the training with current technology. Thus, in the present study, we suggest a training robot to improve the adjustability of autistic children´s way of communications through touching. First, we explore three different ways of touching and compare different force levels of touching for autistic children to those for non-autistic children. As a result, non-autistic children have shown a definite pattern on the way of touching, while there is no pattern in autistic children´s one. Second, we investigate the efficiency of therapy with the robot, when the robot shows its expression to a person with autism. As a result, the participant has indicated that better success rate with the presence of expression from robot.