Using Small Humanoid Robots to Detect Autism in Toddlers

Autism Spectrum Disorder is a developmental disorder often characterized by limited social skills, repetitive behaviors, obsessions, and/or routines. Using the small humanoid robot NAO, we designed an interactive program to elicit common social cues from toddlers while in the presence of trained psychologists during standard toddler assessments. Our program will capture three different videos of the child-robot interaction and create algorithms to analyze the videos and flag autistic behavior to make diagnosis easier for clinicians. Our novel contributions will be automatic video processing and automatic behavior classification for clinicians to use with toddlers, validated on a large number of subjects and using a reproducible and portable robotic program for the NAO robot.