Improving the Joint Attention and Intelligibility in Speech of Autistic Children by an Assistive Robot
Gaurav Aggarwal1, Pooja Sehrawat2, Neha Charaya3
1Gaurav Aggarwal, Department of computer science and engineering and information technology, ITM University, Gurgaon, India.
2Pooja Sehrawat, Department of computer science and engineering and information technology, ITM University, Gurgaon, India.
3Neha Charaya, Department of computer science and engineering and information technology, ITM University, Gurgaon, India.
Manuscript received on June 11, 2013. | Revised Manuscript received on June 15, 2013. | Manuscript published on June 25, 2013. | PP: 52-54 | Volume-1 Issue-8, June 2013. | Retrieval Number: H0359061813/2013©BEIESP
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© The Authors. Published By: Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Abstract: This paper presents an assistive robot for the children with autism to improve their joint attention and intelligibility in the speech over some traditional approaches for rehabilitation of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) where the robot can detect the affective cues of the children implicitly and response to them appropriately. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental brain disorder that is characterized by abnormal social behaviour, reduced interest in communicating with others, language disorders, repetitive and obsessive behaviours and rituals and narrowly focused rigid interests. A reinforcement learning based adaptation mechanism is employed to allow the robot to adjust its behaviors autonomously as a function of the predicted children’s affective state. Although there is no definite treatment or medicine for autism so doctors and therapists can help kids over some kind of difficulties by different psychological and physical therapies. In the above scenario robot detect the child attention at each session. We detect the child attention by reading the child eye gaze pattern and improve the intelligibility by using some training data. Here robot is able to change the scenarios according to the performance of the child.
Keywords: Assistive robot; Autism