autism, simply speaking is hard to ditch other people Let's go. Autistic people may watch you somewhere when you talk to him or laugh suddenly on a serious occasion. Children with autism tend to be unable to ride cars, slack eyes, expressionless faces, and inability to concentrate; in a young age, these shortcomings often caused great adverse effects, such as slow social development.
in order to develop important social skills, researchers at University of Denver tried to make robots help autistic children to communicate. A research team from the school of engineering and computer science of University of Denver has created a humanoid robot to serve autistic children and adolescents aged 7 to 17. Children participating in this program will have a 30 minute course every two weeks. The robot's name is NAO (read NOW); it is a multi-function humanoid robot, it can say jump, and has the ability of face recognition and voice recognition.
why use robots instead of real humans? Researchers believe that robots can promote the development of autistic children's social skills better than humans. In addition, robots are more patient and more accessible to the minds of children with autism than humans. Professor
Mohammad Mahoor said: "the robot we design looks like a human, but not a fully functional person. They can help autistic children because they are simple enough, and their only function is to talk and socialize. Because the gesture and behavior of NAO are highly customized.
researchers used NAO to observe the eyes, facial expressions and imitation of autistic children. NAO is equipped with four microphones and two cameras to record the relevant data of each participant, including the duration and probability of the gaze (attention concentration) and the changes in facial expressions. When children perform well, robots will clap with their children. "We think autistic children really like chatting with robots," says Mahoor, a visual pattern recognition expert and a robot designer,
. At first, this is a surprise to them, but eventually you will see that children have a good friendship with robots.
Mahoor and his interdisciplinary research team developed two games to enable NAO robots to teach children skills in face to face. One game uses several small sandbags, each containing a different expression of the same person, such as happiness, sadness or anger. NAO will let the children in the game find the corresponding expression dolls and hand them to the robot.
all the performances of the children participating in the game will be recorded and analyzed, and the researchers will take the information to the control group. Now, NAO needs a team member to carry out remote control, but eventually professor Mahoor will develop an automatic robot to complete the work.
this experiment gives researchers and parents of autistic children a platform for observation and communication. Preliminary research shows that NAO can help children maintain long gaze. At the 2014 International Conference on autism research, Mahoor and his team published exciting data: when NAO robots are chatting with autistic children, the time they look at is prolonged. But in general, they still have the chance to look elsewhere while communicating, and often look around when speaking.
Mahoor and his colleagues spent 3 years with 40 autistic children. Although there are not many samples, Mahoor and others have found some ways to improve the social disorder of children with autism, and have gained a lot of information in communication with parents of autistic children.
Mahoor said, "we have proved for the first time that this experiment is effective and feasible, and the ultimate goal is to expand the application area of this technology". This means that robot NAO will benefit more autistic children.