Investigating the Effects of Robot-Assisted Therapy among Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder using Bio-markers

2017 International Conference on Advanced Technologies in Design, Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering

工业技术;机械制造;航空航天工程

Bharatharaj, Jaishankar^1 ; Huang, Loulin^1 ; Al-Jumaily, Ahmed^1 ; Elara, Mohan Rajesh^2 ; Krägeloh, Chris^1

Institute of Biomedical Technologies, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand^1

Engineering Product Development, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore, Singapore^2

关键词: Bio-inspired robots;    Children with autisms;    Medical conditions;    Pet Robots;    Robot-assisted therapies;    Social interactions;    Stress levels;    Therapeutic robots;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/234/1/012017/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1757-899X/234/1/012017

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

Therapeutic pet robots designed to help humans with various medical conditions could play a vital role in physiological, psychological and social-interaction interventions for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this paper, we report our findings from a robot-assisted therapeutic study conducted over seven weeks to investigate the changes in stress levels of children with ASD. For this study, we used the parrot-inspired therapeutic robot, KiliRo, we developed and investigated urinary and salivary samples of participating children to report changes in stress levels before and after interacting with the robot. This is a pioneering human-robot interaction study to investigate the effects of robot-assisted therapy using salivary samples. The results show that the bio-inspired robot-assisted therapy can significantly help reduce the stress levels of children with ASD.