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Do Sensory Preferences of Children with Autism Impact an Imitation Task with a Robot?

Published: 06 March 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Imitation is of major importance during social interactions, would it be between humans or between a human and a robot. This is even more true when considering users with special needs. In this paper, we describe an experimental imitation task protocol using a robot Nao that we designed to assess whether sensory profiles of children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) influence their capabilities to imitate or to initiate gestures that are going to be imitated. We based our work on the hypothesis that children with an overreliance on proprioceptive cues and hyporeactivity to visual cues have a greater difficulty imitating and improve their skills more slowly than children with an overreliance on visual cues and hyporeactivity to proprioceptive cues. Twelve children and teenagers with ASD participated in seven imitation sessions over eight weeks. As expected, we observed that children with an overreliance on proprioceptive cues and hyporeactivity to visual cues had more difficulties imitating the robot than the other children. Moreover, the repeated sessions revealed to have positive effects on social behaviors displayed by all children (gaze to the partner, imitations) toward a human partner after the sessions with the robot. We conclude on the possible impacts of such results on the design of social human-robot interactions for users with ASD.

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cover image ACM Conferences
HRI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
March 2017
510 pages
ISBN:9781450343367
DOI:10.1145/2909824
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 06 March 2017

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Author Tags

  1. autism
  2. proprioception
  3. socially assistive robotics

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HRI '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 51 of 211 submissions, 24%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,124 submissions, 24%

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  • (2024)Position Paper: An Emoji-Based Interactive App to Aid Emotion Expression for Autistic ChildrenCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3678478(706-708)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Social Robots: A Promising Tool to Support People with Autism. A Systematic Review of Recent Research and Critical Analysis from the Clinical PerspectiveReview Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders10.1007/s40489-024-00434-5Online publication date: 29-Feb-2024
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  • (2023)Applications of Robotics for Autism Spectrum Disorder: a Scoping ReviewReview Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders10.1007/s40489-023-00402-5Online publication date: 19-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Robot-Assisted Training for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A ReviewJournal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems10.1007/s10846-023-01872-9108:3Online publication date: 24-Jun-2023
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  • (2021)Upper limb exercise with physical and virtual robots: Visual sensitivity affects task performancePaladyn, Journal of Behavioral Robotics10.1515/pjbr-2021-001412:1(199-213)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2021
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