A Preliminary Study on the Response of Autistic Persons to a Robot Feedback based on Visual Stimuli

Abstract

Interactive robots are seen as an efficient tool for the improvement of the social communication skills of autistic children. Recent studies show that the effectiveness of the human-robot interaction can be improved further if the robot can provide positive feedback to the child when he/she demonstrates behaviour or social skills as expected. However, there is no clear answer to which visual stimuli and which combination of visual stimuli could attract better attention. In this paper we present initial results from our study of the response of participants with autism traits to four visual stimuli. We conducted a series of experiments where the experimental system provided a visual response to the user’s actions and monitored the user’s performance for each visual stimulus. The experiments were organised as a game and included four groups of participants with different levels of autism. The results showed that a colour tended to be the most effective way for robot interaction with autistic people. The results could help the design of very effective assistive robots for supporting people with autism.

Keywords

• human-robot interaction
• robot-assisted therapy
• assistive robot
• autism therapy
• affective touch
• visual feedback