Humanoid Robot Helps Train Children with Autism From: Bioscience Technology - 03/21/2013 Aiden, who is three and a half years old, has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). NAO (pronounced "now") is the diminutive "front man" for an elaborate system of cameras, sensors and computers designed specifically to help children like Aiden learn how to coordinate their attention with other people and objects in their environment. This basic social skill is called joint attention. Typically developing children learn it naturally. Children with autism, however, have difficulty mastering it and that inability can compound into a variety of learning difficulties as they age. An interdisciplinary team of mechanical engineers and autism experts at Vanderbilt University have developed the system and used it to demonstrate that robotic systems may be powerful tools for enhancing the basic social learning skills of children with ASD. Writing in the March issue of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, the researchers report that children with ASD paid more attention to the robot and followed its instructions almost as well as they did those of a human therapist in standard exercises used to develop joint attention skill. Read the entire article and view a video (2:41) at: http://www.biosciencetechnology.com/news/2013/03/humanoid-robot-helps-train-children-autism http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2013/03/robot-helps-children-with-autism/ Links: Zachary Warren http://kc.vanderbilt.edu/site/people/11032/warren-zachary.aspx Treatment and Research Institute for Autism Spectrum Disorders (TRIAD) http://kc.vanderbilt.edu/triad/ A Step Towards Developing Adaptive Robot-Mediated Intervention Architecture (ARIA) for Children With Autism http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6373737 NAO http://www.aldebaran-robotics.com/en/ --- Humanoid Robot Helps Train Children with Autism From: Research News @ Vanderbuilt - 03/20/2013 By: David Salisbury Vanderbilt University researchers have developed NAO, a system of sensors, computers, and robots designed to help children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The researchers used the system to demonstrate that robotic systems may be worthwhile tools for enhancing the basic social learning skills of children with ASD. During testing, the researchers found that children with ASD paid more attention to the robot and followed its instructions almost as well as they did those of a human therapist in standard exercises used to develop joint attention skill. "This is the first real-world test of whether intelligent adaptive systems can make an impact on autism," says Vanderbilt professor Zachary Warren. NAO has been programmed with a series of verbal prompts and gestures that imitate those used by human therapists in joint attention training. The researchers tested the relative effectiveness of the robot-based system and human therapists in joint attention training with a dozen children, six with ASD and a control group of six typically developing children. The researchers found that children in both groups spent more time looking at the robot than they spent looking at the human therapist. One of the system's key elements is how it automatically adapts its behavior to each child depending on their responses.