Month-Long, In-Home Socially Assistive Robot for Children with Diverse Needs

Abstract

Socially assistive robotics (SAR) has the potential to close the gap between need and access to individualized, longitudinal support for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) that supplements and augments that of therapist, clinicians, and other caregivers. To this end, we developed a fully autonomous SAR system designed for month-long, in-home interventions with children with ASD. In this paper, we investigate a single case study with two siblings; one is typically developing and the other is affected by ASD. To better understand their help-seeking behaviors and engagement patterns, we define and analyze measures of participants’ attentiveness. Our analysis shows that there are strong correlations between attentiveness and challenge level for both participants. We discuss how attentiveness can be used to optimize challenge level, detect help-seeking behaviors, and improve robot feedback for individuals with diverse needs.