Brief review of robotics in low-functioning autism therapy

© 2020 CEUR-WS. All rights reserved. In the last decade, numerous research studies showed that robots can be suitable assistants in the care and treatment of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Still, more investigation is required to fully assess the introduction of robotics assistants, as the majority of the studies was limited in numbers of participants and scope, e.g. by considering stand-alone interventions, High Functioning Autism (HFA) individuals only, and provided limited objective results, i.e. usually the success is evaluated via qualitative analysis of videos recorded during the interaction. In this paper, we present a brief review of the experience on integrating robotassisted therapy also in the treatment of children with Low-Functioning Autism (LFA) which is the most common case (>70%). Studies described here investigated the integration of a robot-assisted intervention in the training, and the results encourage the use of a robotic assistant also in LFA. Based on this experience, we suggest that current robotic technology is still at an experimental stage and require to actively involve all stakeholders in design of new robotic systems that can successfully account for the peculiar characteristics of ASD individuals.