Interactive robots have been developed as an assistive, therapeutic, educational tools for improvement of the social communication skills in children with autism. However, the main limitation of previous studies in the field is that the aimed social skills were established by the appearances of robots that researchers have designed without detailed explorations of their features to improve the effectiveness of robot-assisted therapy. The purpose of this study is to explore the detailed factors and conduct the design strategy to use the interactive robot effectively in a class. Touch and effective method of feedback are mainly addressed in this study, which could become useful factors in the design of a novel educational robots for children with autism. Several experiments tested to find the novel design approach to set a particular communication skill for children with autism improving through playing robot. All experiments used a human machine interface device called ‘Touch Ball’ and the ‘Touch Game’.
['Jaeryoung Lee', 'Goro Obinata']
Interactive educational material for children with ASD