Effect of Different Visual Stimuli on Joint Attention of ASD Children Using NAO Robot

Abstract

Interaction of autistic children with socially assistive robots have shown improvements in their impairments. This research focuses on one of the core impairments i.e. joint attention of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using robot-mediated therapy. The study aims to compare the effect of different visual stimuli on joint attention. Two different visual cues i.e. rasta and blink by NAO robot are introduced. The evaluation parameters are total time for eye contact and number of eye contacts in response to generated stimuli. The experiment is conducted on 12 ASD children, 8 sessions for each cue over the period of 2 months. Each session consists of 8 trials of each category. This approach achieves 80.3% of accuracy for rasta while 65.1% for blink cue. The average eye contact time for rasta is 38.8 s and for blink is 32.4 s, signifying the effect of a prominent visual cue in improvement of joint attention.