Teaching Assistance through Social Robotics for Children with Autism
In this project, we sought to develop technological assistance for improving communication in autistic children using social robotics. Using a robot, we built conversational AI-based solutions and demonstrated a proof of concept (POC) at ASHA, a leading special-needs school. The POC mainly focused on the communication challenges faced by children with ASD. At the end of seven sessions with six children, all the children needed fewer prompts to perform tasks, and the accuracy of their answers also increased. Two of the children performed tasks in English (which was not their language of choice and not used by special educators in their classrooms). One child showed an improvement in sentence construction while interacting with the robot, and another showed improved motivation to write and recall spellings due to the robot's feedback.
— Nabanita and Siddharth