Long-Term In-Home Robotic Support for Children with ASD

Socially assistive robots (SARs) have long been explored as a promising alternative type of intervention for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Yet, current robot-guided interventions are limited by the restricted availability of clinically relevant interaction contexts, rigid and predefined communication formats, a lack of personalized content to accommodate the diverse behavioral profiles of ASD, and an incomplete understanding of the long-term impact of such robot interventions. My work focuses on developing a system to support individualized, long-term, in-home, play-based interventions. I enhance the social capabilities of SARs and provide tools that allow stakeholders to author personalized interactions. Through enabling robot interventions to more closely mimic human peer-to-peer interactions and focus on delivering personalized therapeutic interactions, my work can potentially lower the barrier for children to transfer the skills they develop during human-robot peer play to human-human contexts, ultimately improving behavioral outcomes for children with ASD.