Measuring Engagement in Robot-Assisted Autism Therapy: A Cross-Cultural Study
Measuring Engagement in Robot-Assisted Autism Therapy: A Cross-Cultural Study
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DOI：
10.3389/frobt.2017.00036
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发表时间：
2017-07-27
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
Picard, Rosalind W.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Rudovic, Ognjen (Oggi);Lee, Jaeryoung;Picard, Rosalind W.
在自闭症儿童的职业治疗期间，经常有必要促使和保持儿童的参与，使他们从治疗中受益。最近，社交机器人已经被用于这一点；然而，现有的机器人缺乏自主识别儿童参与程度的能力，这在选择最佳互动策略时是必要的。自动参与阅读的进展一直受到阻碍，部分原因是缺乏关于儿童与机器人参与自闭症治疗的研究。虽然众所周知，自闭症存在很大的个体差异，但对于这些差异如何在不同文化中存在差异，我们知之甚少。为此，我们分析了来自两个不同文化背景的儿童(3-13岁)的参与情况：亚洲(日本，n=17)和东欧(塞尔维亚，n=19)。这些儿童参加了25分钟的治疗，在此期间，我们研究了儿童的行为投入(任务驱动)和情感投入的不同方面(效价和唤醒)之间的关系。尽管我们的结果表明，两组儿童在敬业度表现上存在统计上的显著差异，但由于研究中儿童的年龄和行为严重程度存在很大差异，很难对这些差异做出任何因果关系的断言。然而，我们的探索性分析揭示了目标投入与感知的效价和唤醒水平之间的重要联系，表明这些可以作为治疗期间儿童投入的替代指标。我们就如何利用这一点来优化社交机器人治疗自闭症提供了建议，同时考虑到文化差异。
During occupational therapy for children with autism, it is often necessary to elicit and maintain engagement for the children to benefit from the session. Recently, social robots have been used for this; however, existing robots lack the ability to autonomously recognize the children's level of engagement, which is necessary when choosing an optimal interaction strategy. Progress in automated engagement reading has been impeded in part due to a lack of studies on child-robot engagement in autism therapy. While it is well known that there are large individual differences in autism, little is known about how these vary across cultures. To this end, we analyzed the engagement of children (age 3-13) from two different cultural backgrounds: Asia (Japan, n = 17) and Eastern Europe (Serbia, n = 19). The children participated in a 25 min therapy session during which we studied the relationship between the children's behavioral engagement (task-driven) and different facets of affective engagement (valence and arousal). Although our results indicate that there are statistically significant differences in engagement displays in the two groups, it is difficult to make any causal claims about these differences due to the large variation in age and behavioral severity of the children in the study. However, our exploratory analysis reveals important associations between target engagement and perceived levels of valence and arousal, indicating that these can be used as a proxy for the children's engagement during the therapy. We provide suggestions on how this can be leveraged to optimize social robots for autism therapy, while taking into account cultural differences.