Abstract
Recent studies have shown that children with autism may be interested in playing with an interactive robot. Moreover, the robot can engage these children in ways that demonstrate essential aspects of human interaction, guiding them in therapeutic sessions to practice more complex forms of interaction found in social human-to-human interactions. We review published articles on robot-assisted autism therapy (RAAT) to understand the trends in research on this type of therapy for children with autism and to provide practitioners and researchers with insights and possible future directions in the field. Specifically, we analyze 38 articles, all of which are refereed journal articles, that were indexed on Web of Science from 2009 onward, and discuss the distribution of the articles by publication year, article type, database and journal, research field, robot type, participant age range, and target behaviors. Overall, the results show considerable growth in the number of journal publications on RAAT, reflecting increased interest in the use of robot technology in autism therapy as a salient and legitimate research area. Factors, such as new advances in artificial intelligence techniques and machine learning, have spurred this growth.
Highlights
Academic Editors: Grazia D’OnofrioAutism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurological and developmental disorder that begins early in childhood
We classified the type of robot used in the experiment into five categories: human-like, animal-like, toy-like, machine-like, and wearable robots; From our review, we found that the majority of the articles used a humanlike robot in their studies [2,6,9,10,14,18,19,21,24,37], seven articles used an animal-like robot [27,28,29,31,32,33,36], five articles used a toy-like robot [17,20,22,23,30], two articles used a machine-like robot [25,35], and only one article used a wearable robot [34]
Robot-assisted intervention should be viewed as a technological development that enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of autism therapy
Summary
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurological and developmental disorder that begins early in childhood. The Centers for Disease Control describe it as “a developmental disability that can cause significant social, communication and behavioral challenges”. Children with ASD face challenges that affect how they communicate, interact, behave, and learn. Diagnostic challenges can cause delays or misdiagnosis, such as limited knowledge of ASD among families as well as a lack of professionals and programs raising awareness of autism among the general public. The ASD field lacks sufficient research, which can lead to insufficient quality of services being provided. Delivering health care to children with ASD has many limitations given the small number of specialist centers and available professionals. The medical center might affect treatment and have high costs [2,3,4]
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