Robot applications for autism: a comprehensive review

Abstract

Purpose

Technological advances in robotics have brought about exciting developments in different areas such as education, training, and therapy. Recent research has suggested that the robot can be even more effective in rehabilitation, therapy, and education for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In this paper, a comprehensive review of robotic technology for children with ASD is presented wherein a large number of journals and conference proceedings in science and engineering search engines' databases were implicated.

Materials and methods

A search for related literature was conducted in three search engines' databases, Web of Science, Scopus, and IEEE Xplore. Thematic keywords were used to identify articles in the recent ten years in titles, keywords, and abstracts. The retrieved articles were filtered, analysed, and evaluated based on specific inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Results

A total of 208 studies were retrieved, while 166 met the inclusion criteria. The selected studies were reviewed according to the type of robot, the participants, objectives, and methods. 68 robots were used in all studies, NAO robot was used in 30.5% of those studies. The total number of participants in all studies was 1671. The highest percentage of the studies reviewed were dedicated to augmenting the learning skills.

Conclusions

Robots and the associated schemes were used to determine their feasibility and validity for augmenting the learning skills of autistic children. Most of the studies reviewed were focused on improving the social communication skills of autistic children and measuring the extent of robot mitigation of stereotyped autistic behaviours.

Implications for rehabilitation

• Social robots are not considered as promising tools to be utilized for rehabilitation of autistic children only, but also has been used for children and young people with severe intellectual disability.

• Rehabilitation for individuals with ASD using robots can augment their cognitive and social skills, but further studies should be conducted to clarify its effectiveness based on other factors such as sex, age and IQ of the participates.

• Robotic-based rehabilitation is not limited to the physical robots only, but virtual robots have been used also, whereas each of which can be used individually or simultaneously. However, further study is required to assess the extent of its efficiency and effectiveness for both cases.

Keywords:

• Social robots
• autistic children
• autism therapy
• robotic treatment
• ASD rehabilitation
• robotic intervention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors would like to thank the Ministry of Education (MOE) Malaysia for providing the grant 600-IRMI/FRGS 5/3 (150/2019), and the Research Management Centre (RMC) of Universiti Teknologi Mara for supporting this research work.