Toward Robot-Assisted Psychosocial Intervention for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

The effectiveness of social robots in education is typically demonstrated, circumstantially, involving small samples of students [1]. Our interest here is in special education in Greece regarding Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) involving large samples of children students. Following a recent work review, this paper reports the specifications of a protocol for testing the effectiveness of robot (NAO)-based treatment of ASD children compared to conventional human (therapist)-based treatment. The proposed protocol has been developed by the collaboration of a clinical scientific team with a technical scientific team. The modular structure of the aforementioned protocol allows for implementing parametrically a number of tools and/or theories such as the theory-of-mind account from psychology; moreover, the engagement of the innovative Lattice Computing (LC) information processing paradigm is considered here toward making the robot more autonomous. This paper focuses on the methodological and design details of the proposed intervention protocol that is underway; the corresponding results will be reported in a future publication.