Survey
Designing a Robot Companion for Children with Neuro-Developmental Disorders
Gelsomini M, Degiorgi M, Garzotto F, Leonardi G, Penati S, Ramuzat N, Silvestri J & Casadonte F
IDC '17 Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children 451-457
DOI>10.1145/3078072.3084308
Link through to full text: //dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3084308Objective: The authors set out to do two things.
- to collect information from 15 pediatric therapy ‘specialists’ and create a list of desired properties in a robot companion
- to study the classes of features that are present in available robots
Process: 21 common robots are chosen, and the concepts are both outlaid in matrixes for comparison.
Findings: The authors come up with “Robot’s Rules”. First, desired properties: a therapy robot should facilitate, prompt, restrict, emulate, provide feedback; and act as a social mediator, an affective agent and an emotional agent. Secondly, the five classes of features that social robots should have are identified: appearance, multimodality, multisensorialilty, configurability and safety.