Objectives: Our goal is to create a deployable robotic therapy system based on commercial off-the-shelf robots and custom-developed software. This system is easy to use and robust in the treatment environment. Our goal is to support multiple therapy techniques. It will provide the basis for activities that promote joint attention, verbalization, imitation skills, bilateral coordination and intrapersonal/interpersonal synchrony. The system should be applicable to multiple adult-robot-child contexts. The system must be programmable by clinicians, highly portable, and easy to set up and operate.
Methods: We began by designing a series of imitation-based activities that would support the clinicain’s treatment goals. These included movement games, locomotion games, and rhythmic activities (including drumming). We then identified robotic actions that supported these activities. We looked at available robots and identified three units for development. The Isobot from Tommy, Inc. which has an inexpensive humanoid form with preprogrammed behaviors. The Rovio from WowWee is a wheeled robot platform that supports the locomotion context. The Nao from Aldebaran is a highly sophisticated and robust humanoid platform that provides direct control of multiple facets of its behavior.
We then created a unified software platform that would control all three robots. We use an embodied music therapy approach to facilitate social communication skills in typically developoing children and children with autism wherein the robot progresses from whole body rhythmic actions to finer drumming actions. A variety of simple to complex behaviors were triggered during the training sessions using a session controller software that simplified the operation for the adult trainer. 12 typically developing children and 4 children with ASDs interacted with Nao across 12 rhythm-training sessions within a robot-child-child context. Pre-, mid- and posttest data have been collected to examine the child’s social and motor skills during whole body rhythmic actions and drumming. We integrated various hardware components to allow the computer to communicate with the different robots.
Results: We have created a portable system that has been deployed in two studies. With this system researchers were able to create systematized therapy sessions using repetitive and dynamic actions in varying sequences without any programming. Preliminary analyses are currently ongoing. We hypothesize that, with training, the children will improve their intralimb and interlimb coordination during rhythmic actions such as marching, clapping, and drumming. We also hypothesize that social interactions such as conversation bouts and rates of joint attention bids will increase across training sessions.
Conclusions: Overall, we believe that the rhythm intervention context developed with the Nao robot and the locomotion intervention context developed with the Rovio are highly engaging context for children to facilitate their social communication and motor skills.