Parents' Evaluation of Interaction between Robots and Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders

<p>This presentation concerns the&nbsp;paper:</p> <p>Andreeva, A., Lekova, A., Simonska, M., Tanev, T. (2022). Parents&rsquo; Evaluation of Interaction Between Robots and Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders. In: Uskov, V.L., Howlett, R.J., Jain, L.C. (eds) Smart Education and e-Learning - Smart Pedagogy. SEEL-22 2022. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 305. Springer.</p> <p>It presents&nbsp;the&nbsp;evaluation of child-robot interaction in play-like structured speech and language therapy for children with neurodevelopmental disorders. It is organized like a group session. Participants are a speech and language therapist, a child and two robots that assist the therapeutic session: the humanoid robot NAO and its &ldquo;friend&rdquo; the emotion-expressive robot EMOSAN. Two engineers who developed and deployed the technical scenarios observe the process and control the robots. Researchers developed an online questionnaire for evaluation of interaction between the child and the robots. Parents of involved children with neurodevelopmental disorders stay in the room and they observe the robot-assisted session. Results show that children are interested in playing and learning with robots. There is a correlation between the type of children&rsquo;s neurodevelopmental disorder and the use of verbal communication in interaction. According to parents&rsquo; answers of the questionnaire, most of the children liked to interact with robots during the play-like structured activities in the speech and language therapy session.</p>