Conversational Agents in Therapeutic Interventions for Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Survey
It provides a structured overview and recommendations for researchers and practitioners working on conversational agents to support therapy for neurodevelopmental disorders, but it is incremental as a survey paper.
This survey analyzes the use of conversational agents in therapeutic interventions for neurodevelopmental disorders, identifying key design features, therapeutic goals, and evaluation methods, and proposes a research agenda to address gaps in the field.
Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDD) are a group of conditions with onset in the developmental period characterized by deficits in the cognitive and social areas. Conversational agents have been increasingly explored to support therapeutic interventions for people with NDD. This survey provides a structured view of the crucial design features of these systems, the types of therapeutic goals they address, and the empirical methods adopted for their evaluation. From this analysis, we elaborate a set of recommendations and highlight the gaps left unsolved in the state of the art, upon which we ground a research agenda on conversational agents for NDD.