An intelligent platform to design and develop low-cost assistive technologies and robotic assistants for children with disabilities

Abstract

According to latest estimates of the World Health Organization (WHO), in many low-income and middle-income countries, only between 5 and 15% of people who require assistive devices and technologies have access to them. This situation becomes more complicated in the field of special education due to the lack of resources and/or government support plans. On this basis, in this paper, we present an intelligent platform to support the design and the development of low-cost robotic assistants and assistive technologies to carry out educational inclusion processes with children with disabilities. The system relies on a web-based environment, a rule-based module (for decision support), and can generate skeleton projects for Arduino and Raspberry platforms. To validate our proposal, we have carried out a plan consisting of two stages. In the first one, we conducted several laboratory tests to determine the platform’s performance. In the second stage, we have measured the perceptions about the platform. To this aim, 38 volunteers (students and engineers of electronic and computer science careers) have tested all the functionalities of the platform.