Abstract
Robot-assisted therapy (RAT) offers potential advantages for improving the social skills of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). This article provides an overview of the developed technology and clinical results of the EC-FP7-funded Development of Robot-Enhanced therapy for children with AutisM spectrum disorders (DREAM) project, which aims to develop the next level of RAT in both clinical and technological perspectives, commonly referred to as robot-enhanced therapy (RET). Within this project, a supervised autonomous robotic system is collaboratively developed by an interdisciplinary consortium including psychotherapists, cognitive scientists, roboticists, computer scientists, and ethicists, which allows robot control to exceed classical remote control methods, e.g., Wizard of Oz (WoZ), while ensuring safe and ethical robot behavior. Rigorous clinical studies are conducted to validate the efficacy of RET. Current results indicate that RET can obtain an equivalent performance compared to that of human standard therapy for children with ASDs. We also discuss the next steps of developing RET robotic systems.
Highlights
Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) has shown potential advantages to improve social skills for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD)
This paper overviews the technology development and clinical results of the EC-FP7 funded DREAM project that aims to develop the level of RAT in both clinical and technological perspectives – which we term Robot-Enhanced Therapy (RET)
A supervised autonomous robotic system is collaboratively developed by an interdisciplinary consortium, including psychotherapists, cognitive scientists, roboticists, computer scientists and ethicists, allowing the robot control to go beyond the classical remote control methods (Wizard of Oz – WoZ) while ensuring safe and ethical robot behavior
Summary
Attention over the past two decades, with a significant increase in the past one [4]. The WoZ technique allows human therapists to achieve a high level of social interaction without a complex robotic system. It requires a significant amount of human workload and is not suitable in the long term [8]. Full autonomy (Figure 1-middle) indicates that the robot makes decisions and adapts its actions to any situation by itself This is not feasible at this point as the robot’s actions must be compliant with the therapeutic goals, the interaction context, and state of the child while its action policies cannot be perfect. When necessary the supervisor can override the robot’s actions before execution to ensure that only therapeutically valid actions are executed
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