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Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders Make a Fruit Salad with Probo, the Social Robot: An Interaction Study

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Abstract

Social robots are thought to be motivating tools in play tasks with children with autism spectrum disorders. Thirty children with autism were included using a repeated measurements design. It was investigated if the children’s interaction with a human differed from the interaction with a social robot during a play task. Also, it was examined if the two conditions differed in their ability to elicit interaction with a human accompanying the child during the task. Interaction of the children with both partners did not differ apart from the eye-contact. Participants had more eye-contact with the social robot compared to the eye-contact with the human. The conditions did not differ regarding the interaction elicited with the human accompanying the child.

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Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology (IWT) Strategic Basic research Grant Project Number 121591 (for the first author of this study). Other authors are supported by the CNCS-Bucharest, Romania Project PN-II-IDPCE-2011-3-0484—Exploring Robot-assisted therapy for children with ASD and the EU-FP7 project DREAM (Project No. 611391). We thank to the master students Stephanie Van der Donck and Debbie Willockx for their important contribution to the meticulous video annotation and implementation of the experiments and to the psychologists from the three Belgian schools, Griet and Ilse from De Leydraad school in Antwerp, Filip de Vos from Woudlucht school in Leuven and, Marie De Witte from De Oase school in Gent, for their assistance with recruitment and organization of the experiments.

Author Contributions

The research presented in this study represents part of a PhD work of the first author. The second author, the promoter of the PhD student, guided the research process. The first and the second author contributed to the writing of the manuscript, design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation. The third author' contribution consists in supporting the PhD student with the implementation of the experiments. The fourth author is the engineer that programmed and operated the robot during the experiments, under the supervision of her promoter, the last author of this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Clinical and Lifespan Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Ramona E. Simut & Johan Vanderfaeillie

  2. Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Andreea Peca

  3. Robotics and Multibody Mechanics Research Group, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

    Greet Van de Perre & Bram Vanderborght

Authors
  1. Ramona E. Simut
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  2. Johan Vanderfaeillie
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  3. Andreea Peca
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  4. Greet Van de Perre
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  5. Bram Vanderborght
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ramona E. Simut.

Appendix

Appendix

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Table 4 The protocol of the experimental task
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Simut, R.E., Vanderfaeillie, J., Peca, A. et al. Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders Make a Fruit Salad with Probo, the Social Robot: An Interaction Study. J Autism Dev Disord 46, 113–126 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-015-2556-9

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