Playing assistant for physical handicapped children

The work described in this paper is mainly based on a qualitative study which is aimed to analyse how children with physical handicaps play in comparison with abled children. In this study it was proved through many statements from parents and therapists that play is an important part of the development of a child, but that severe physically handicapped children are very restricted in their possibilities to play. Many of these children only have the possibility to watch and observe how other children or their brothers and sisters or parents are playing and so they compensate their lack of experience only to some extent The study finally concludes that for children with severe physical handicaps a toy robot system can be a reasonable solution to enable playing itself and furthermore to learn. Thus, one particular result of the study is a prototype for a dedicated robot system which supports children with the above mentioned handicaps for interaction with standard toys being realized by ARC Seibersdorf research GmbH. Besides of a description of the robot prototype this paper gives first results from user trials and outlines future development