A robotic system to give prompting to children with disabilities when using a Lego robot

• Author / Creator

  Gomez Medina, Maria

• Play is a crucial activity in which children explore and interact with the environment through the manipulation of objects, developing cognitive, social and linguistic skills. Play in children with physical disabilities may be compromised due to their physical limitations and the lack of opportunities to play, resulting in delays and other effects on their cognitive and social skills. Studies using robots for children with disabilities to access play have found that children enjoyed playing with robots, and they felt more independent. However, most of these studies reported that using a robot could be cognitively demanding for young children, which could lead to frustration when using it. Successfully performing manipulation using a robot requires that children have some basic skills that they may not have fully acquired at young ages. Prompting from adults has been used to facilitate play in children with disabilities. However, adults tend to over-prompt, thus taking away the opportunity from children to learn and to try out experiences themselves. Technology could provide a more consistent way to prompt children with disabilities by giving prompts only when they need it. The objective of the present study was to develop and test a robotic system to give prompts to children when they are controlling a Lego robot to perform a set of tasks. The long-term goal is for the robotic system to give the prompts by itself using a learning algorithm. A single subject design with a baseline and two intervention phases was performed with six typically developing children and one child with physical disabilities. In the baseline phase children used the robot to perform the tasks with no prompting. In the first intervention phase, children performed the same tasks but with simulated prompting from the robot (the researcher actually determined which prompts should be given and sent the commands to the robot). Comparisons between baseline and the first intervention phases showed that there was no significant difference when children used the robots in terms of the success rate of the task. However, the robotic prompting did impact children’s performance in the first intervention sessions. It took them one or two sessions to get used to the robot giving the prompts and talking. In the second intervention a time threshold algorithm that gave the prompts to participants automatically after an estimated time was tested. Results showed that such an algorithm with only time as a variable was not able to give the prompting when the children actually needed it. For that reason, eye gaze, face gestures, what participants say and the position of the participant´s hands were the suggested variables that a learning algorithm could use to determine what prompts should be given to children so that in future work, a learning algorithm can be applied to the robotic system. From the interaction of the robot with children it was possible to conclude that children responded fairly well to the robot giving the prompts. However, the robotic system needs improvements to make it more interactive to keep children engaged in the activities. Also, a familiarization phase with the robot talking and giving prompts to children was suggested, so children can get used to how the robot works.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Play
  • Prompting
  • Robots
  • Children with disabilities

• Graduation date

  Spring 2019

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-ysq6-4393

• License

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