Dataset Information

Long-Term Personalization of an In-Home Socially Assistive Robot for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders.

ABSTRACT: Socially assistive robots (SAR) have shown great potential to augment the social and educational development of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). As SAR continues to substantiate itself as an effective enhancement to human intervention, researchers have sought to study its longitudinal impacts in real-world environments, including the home. Computational personalization stands out as a central computational challenge as it is necessary to enable SAR systems to adapt to each child's unique and changing needs. Toward that end, we formalized personalization as a hierarchical human robot learning framework (hHRL) consisting of five controllers (disclosure, promise, instruction, feedback, and inquiry) mediated by a meta-controller that utilized reinforcement learning to personalize instruction challenge levels and robot feedback based on each user's unique learning patterns. We instantiated and evaluated the approach in a study with 17 children with ASD, aged 3-7 years old, over month-long interventions in their homes. Our findings demonstrate that the fully autonomous SAR system was able to personalize its instruction and feedback over time to each child's proficiency. As a result, every child participant showed improvements in targeted skills and long-term retention of intervention content. Moreover, all child users were engaged for a majority of the intervention, and their families reported the SAR system to be useful and adaptable. In summary, our results show that autonomous, personalized SAR interventions are both feasible and effective in providing long-term in-home developmental support for children with diverse learning needs.

SUBMITTER: Clabaugh C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7805891 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Long-Term Personalization of an In-Home Socially Assistive Robot for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Clabaugh Caitlyn C Mahajan Kartik K Jain Shomik S Pakkar Roxanna R Becerra David D Shi Zhonghao Z Deng Eric E Lee Rhianna R Ragusa Gisele G Matarić Maja M

Frontiers in robotics and AI 20191106

Socially assistive robots (SAR) have shown great potential to augment the social and educational development of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). As SAR continues to substantiate itself as an effective enhancement to human intervention, researchers have sought to study its longitudinal impacts in real-world environments, including the home. Computational personalization stands out as a central computational challenge as it is necessary to enable SAR systems to adapt to each child's ...[more]

PMID: 33501125

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Project description:BackgroundSocially assistive robots (SARs) have been proposed as a tool to help individuals who have had a stroke to perform their exercise during their rehabilitation process. Yet, to date, there are no data on the motivating benefit of SARs in a long-term interaction with post-stroke patients.MethodsHere, we describe a robot-based gamified exercise platform, which we developed for long-term post-stroke rehabilitation. The platform uses the humanoid robot Pepper, and also has a computer-based configuration (with no robot). It includes seven gamified sets of exercises, which are based on functional tasks from the everyday life of the patients. The platform gives the patients instructions, as well as feedback on their performance, and can track their performance over time. We performed a long-term patient-usability study, where 24 post-stroke patients were randomly allocated to exercise with this platform-either with the robot or the computer configuration-over a 5-7 week period, 3 times per week, for a total of 306 sessions.ResultsThe participants in both groups reported that this rehabilitation platform addressed their arm rehabilitation needs, and they expressed their desire to continue training with it even after the study ended. We found a trend for higher acceptance of the system by the participants in the robot group on all parameters; however, this difference was not significant. We found that system failures did not affect the long-term trust that users felt towards the system.ConclusionsWe demonstrated the usability of using this platform for a long-term rehabilitation with post-stroke patients in a clinical setting. We found high levels of acceptance of both platform configurations by patients following this interaction, with higher ratings given to the SAR configuration. We show that it is not the mere use of technology that increases the motivation of the person to practice, but rather it is the appreciation of the technology's effectiveness and its perceived contribution to the rehabilitation process. In addition, we provide a list of guidelines that can be used when designing and implementing other technological tools for rehabilitation.Trial registrationThis trial is registered in the NIH ClinicalTrials.gov database. Registration number NCT03651063, registration date 21.08.2018. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03651063 .

Project description:OBJECTIVE:With an elderly population that is set to more than double by 2050 worldwide, there will be an increased demand for elderly care. This poses several impediments in the delivery of high-quality health and social care. Socially assistive robot (SAR) technology could assume new roles in health and social care to meet this higher demand. This review qualitatively examines the literature on the use of SAR in elderly care and aims to establish the roles this technology may play in the future. DESIGN:Scoping review. DATA SOURCES:Search of CINAHL, Cochrane Library, Embase, MEDLINE, PsychINFO and Scopus databases was conducted, complemented with a free search using Google Scholar and reference harvesting. All publications went through a selection process, which involved sequentially reviewing the title, abstract and full text of the publication. No limitations regarding date of publication were imposed, and only English publications were taken into account. The main search was conducted in March 2016, and the latest search was conducted in September 2017. ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA:The inclusion criteria consist of elderly participants, any elderly healthcare facility, humanoid and pet robots and all social interaction types with the robot. Exclusions were acceptability studies, technical reports of robots and publications surrounding physically or surgically assistive robots. RESULTS:In total, 61 final publications were included in the review, describing 33 studies and including 1574 participants and 11 robots. 28 of the 33 papers report positive findings. Five roles of SAR were identified: affective therapy, cognitive training, social facilitator, companionship and physiological therapy. CONCLUSIONS:Although many positive outcomes were reported, a large proportion of the studies have methodological issues, which limit the utility of the results. Nonetheless, the reported value of SAR in elderly care does warrant further investigation. Future studies should endeavour to validate the roles demonstrated in this review. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION:NIHR 58672.

Project description:Flourishing is an indicator of positive mental health and is important for children's development and well-being. We used variables from the National Survey of Children's Health 2016 as indicators of flourishing (difficulty making friends, is bullied, bullies others, shares ideas with family, argues, finishes tasks, does all homework, shows curiosity, stays calm, and cares about doing well in school) to compare differences in parent perceptions of their children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We anticipate that these findings will help identify intervention targets to support the well-being of individuals with ASD. Children between 6 and 17 years of age, without intellectual disability, brain injury, cerebral palsy, or Down syndrome were included. Total participants were 34,171 controls (male/female = 17,116/17,155) and 812 with ASD (male/female = 668/144). Factor analysis resulted in three-factor structures (social competence, behavioral control, and school motivation) with good model fit (root mean square error of approximation = 0.08, comparative fit index = 0.92, Tucker-Lewis index = 0.89). The multivariate regression model and propensity score with inverse probability of treatment weighting (PS-IPTW) method revealed that children with ASD had lower scores in the social competence and behavioral control factors compared to the control group (all P < 0.05). However, no significant differences were found in the school motivation factor between the two groups (P > 0.05) in both multivariate regression model and PS-IPTW method. Findings suggest that social competence and behavioral control are indicators of flourishing and are important intervention targets to increase flourishing among children with ASD. Autism Res 2019, 12: 952-966. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Flourishing is an indicator of positive mental health and is important for children's development and well-being. We used variables from The National Survey of Children's Health 2016 to examine differences in parent perceptions of the indicators of flourishing (difficulty making friends, is bullied, bullies others, shares ideas with family, argues, finishes tasks, does all homework, shows curiosity, stays calm, and cares about doing well in school) between children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We anticipate that this information will help to identify therapeutic targets to support the well-being of individuals with ASD. Children between 6 and 17 years old, without intellectual disability (ID), brain injury (BI), cerebral palsy (CP), or Down syndrome (DS) were included. From the total (N = 50,212), we excluded children under age 6 (n = 14,494), those who once, but do not currently have ASD (n = 81), and those with ID (n = 432), BI (n = 170), CP (n = 35), and DS (n = 17), resulting in 34,983 records used. Total participants, age 6-17 years, were 34,171 controls (male/female = 17,116/17,155) and 812 with ASD (male/female = 668/144). Factor analysis resulted in the identification of three flourishing categories among the indicator variables (social competence, behavioral control, and school motivation). Children with ASD had lower scores in the social competence and behavioral control factors compared to the control group. However, there were no significant differences in the school motivation factor between the two groups. Findings suggest that social competence and behavioral control are indicators of flourishing and are important intervention targets to increase flourishing among children with ASD.

Project description:Many individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) demonstrate some challenges with personal narrative writing. Sentence completion tests (SCT) is a class of semi-structured projective techniques and encourage respondents to disclose their private narratives. Even in SCT, only providing beginning of sentences is inadequate to compensate atypicalities in their creativity and imagination, and self-disclosure is difficult for many individuals with ASD. It is reported that many individuals with ASD often achieve a higher degree of task engagement through interactions with robots and that robotic systems may be useful in eliciting and promoting social communication such as self-disclosure for some individuals with ASD. There is a possibility that exemplification by android robots in place of human interviewers can result in a higher degree of task engagement for individuals with ASD. The objective of this study was to investigate whether additional exemplifications by android robots in the SCT can prompt self-disclosure for individuals with ASD. We compared the difference in disclosure statements and subjective emotion in the testing paper of the SCT in additional exemplification by an android robot and a human interviewer. In addition, we assessed the disclosure statements and subjective emotions in the SCT, for which exemplifications were written on testing paper to make the comparison. Our quantitative data suggested that exemplification by android robot promoted more self-disclosure, especially about the negative topic compared to exemplification by a human interviewer and that written on test paper. In addition, the level of participant embarrassment in response to exemplification by the android robot seemed to be lower compared to that in the human interviewer condition. In the assessment and support for individuals with ASD, eliciting self-disclosure is a pressing issue. It is hoped that the appropriate use of robots will lead to a better understanding and support for their application.

Dataset Information

Long-Term Personalization of an In-Home Socially Assistive Robot for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Publications

Long-Term Personalization of an In-Home Socially Assistive Robot for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders.

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