Emotional Robot to Examine Differences in Play Patterns and Affective Response of Children with and Without ASD

Robots are often employed to proactively engage children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in well-defined physical or social activities to promote specific educational or therapeutic outcomes. However, much can also be learned by leveraging a robot's unique ability to objectively deliver stimuli in a consistent, repeatable way and record child-robot interactions that may be indicative of developmental ability and autism severity in this population. In this study, we elicited affective responses with an emotion-simulating robot and recorded child-robot interactions and child-other interactions during robot emotion states. This research makes two key contributions. First, we analyzed child-robot interactions and affective responses to an emotion-simulating robot to explore differences between the responses of typically developing children and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Next, we characterized play and affective responsivity and its connection to severity of autism symptoms using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) calibrated severity scores. This preliminary work delivers a novel and robust robot-enabled technique for (1) differentiating child-robot interactions of a group of very young children with ASD (n=12) from a group of typically developing children (n=15) and, (2) characterizing within-group differences in play and affective response that may be associated with symptoms of autism severity.