Exploratory Study: Children's with Autism Awareness of being Imitated by Nao Robot
This is an incremental study exploring robot-assisted interventions for children with ASD, with potential implications for therapeutic applications.
The study investigated whether children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are aware of being imitated by a Nao robot during play interactions, analyzing behaviors like eye gaze and arm movements, but the results only partially confirmed the hypothesis.
This paper presents an exploratory study designed for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) that investigates children's awareness of being imitated by a robot in a play/game scenario. The Nao robot imitates all the arm movement behaviors of the child in real-time in dyadic and triadic interactions. Different behavioral criteria (i.e., eye gaze, gaze shifting, initiation and imitation of arm movements, smile/laughter) were analyzed based on the video data of the interaction. The results confirm only parts of the research hypothesis. However, these results are promising for the future directions of this work.