Improving social skills in children with ASD using a long-term, in-home social robot
Abstract
Social robots can offer tremendous possibilities for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) interventions. To date, most studies with this population have used short, isolated encounters in controlled laboratory settings. Our study focused on a 1-month, home-based intervention for increasing social communication skills of 12 children with ASD between 6 and 12 years old using an autonomous social robot. The children engaged in a triadic interaction with a caregiver and the robot for 30 min every day to complete activities on emotional storytelling, perspective-taking, and sequencing. The robot encouraged engagement, adapted the difficulty of the activities to the child’s past performance, and modeled positive social skills. The system maintained engagement over the 1-month deployment, and children showed improvement on joint attention skills with adults when not in the presence of the robot. These results were also consistent with caregiver questionnaires. Caregivers reported less prompting over time and overall increased communication.
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Supplementary Material
Summary
Movie S1. The robot leads the child and the caregiver into an interactive barrier game in which the child builds a rocket and then explains to the caregiver their rocket.
Movie S2. The robot tells a story and asks the child how the main character is feeling at a certain point in the story.
Data file S3. Gameplay data set.
Data file S4. Joint attention data set.
Data file S5. Caregiver survey data set.
Resources
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Science Robotics
Volume 3 | Issue 21
August 2018
August 2018
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.
This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
Submission history
Received: 1 April 2018
Accepted: 30 July 2018
Acknowledgments
We are indebted to the other members of the Expedition in Computing on Socially Assistive Robotics for their contribution of social skills game software and the early development of other socially assistive systems that led to the deployment reported here, especially M. Mataric, C. Breazeal, C. Nass, F. Volkmar, M. Jung, A. Ramachandran, S. Sebo, D. Becerra, C. Claybaugh, J. Kory, S. Shen, M. Baranov, and A. Waugh. We also thank L. Hall for scheduling and administrative support, L. Scassellati for photo assistance, and all of the families that welcomed a robot into their homes. Funding: Support was provided by an NSF Expedition in Computing, B.S. is the principal investigator, #1139078 (Socially Assistive Robotics). F.S. was supported by funding by NIH grant no. K01MH104739. Author contributions: All authors took part in experimental design and deployment. B.S., C.-M.H., M.Q., and N.S. designed and constructed the robotic system and associated software. L.B., M.M., P.V., and F.S. conducted clinical assessments and provided clinical oversight. F.S. and C.-M.H. provided statistical analyses. Competing interests: L.B. is now supported by Vän Robotics, which constructs tutoring robots though not for children with ASD, and F.S. and B.S. serve as advisor board members. Data and materials availability: All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper or the Supplementary Materials. Software available from github.com/ScazLab. Contact B.S. for other materials.
Authors
Funding Information
National Science Foundation: 1139078
National Institutes of Health: 5K01MH104739
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