A Pilot Study of Using Touch Sensing and Robotic Feedback for Children with Autism

It is an advantage to use robots in autism therapy since they provide repetitive stimuli during the learning of social skills. A detailed exploration is required to design assistive robots for autism therapy with higher effectiveness. This study has investigated the effectiveness of an interactive robot's feedback during autism therapy for improving specific social skills of the children. The experiment described in this study is that children with autism engaged with an interactive system to perform affective touch behaviour and received the robot's visual and auditory feedback. Results showed that the presence of an interactive robot's feedback triggered more effective children's touch behaviour.