ANALYSIS AND IMPROVEMENT IN ASD THERAPIES USING ROBOTICS

Abstract

Autism is a neurodevelopment disorder affecting 7.5 million people around the world. 1 in 42 boys have autism and there is no cure for this. Child suffering from autism challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, speech and nonverbal communication. Several therapies are done to minimize the effects of autism and make children more social and less anxious. Our idea is to use combination of different biomedical and other sensors to get data from autistic children and study their behavior. NAO is used as a therapy robot which performs different actions and child’s behavior is noted. We used EEG, EMG and Kinect to get insights about the behavior of autistic children. We performed two interventions i.e. Joint Attention and Imitation on different children with different severity level of autism and it was noted that there were some improvements in their behavior. They become more familiarized and comfortable with the robot and their social skills were enhanced.