Could Interaction with Social Robots Facilitate Joint Attention of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder?
This research addresses joint attention deficits in children with ASD, offering potential intervention tools, but it is incremental as it builds on existing social robot studies.
The study investigated whether social robots could improve joint attention in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), finding that robots attracted more attention and enabled gaze transitions compared to human agents, though with fewer fixations on targets.
This research addressed whether interactions with social robots could facilitate joint attention of the autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Two conditions of initiators, namely 'Human' vs. 'Robot' were measured with 15 children with ASD and 15 age-matched typically developing (TD) children. Apart from fixation and gaze transition, a new longest common subsequence (LCS) approach was proposed to analyze eye-movement traces. Results revealed that children with ASD showed deficits of joint attention. Compared to the human agent, robot facilitate less fixations towards the targets, but it attracted more attention and allowed the children to show gaze transition and to follow joint attention logic. This results highlight both potential application of LCS analysis on eye-tracking studies and of social robot to intervention.