Subtle emotional expressions of synthetic characters
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies - Special issue: Subtle expressivity for characters and robots
Encouraging speech and vocalization in children with autistic spectrum disorder
ACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing - ASSETS 2007 doctoral consortium
Robotic animals might aid in the social development of children with autism
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE international conference on Human robot interaction
Robot-assisted therapy for children with autism spectrum disorders
IDC '08 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Interaction design and children
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Difficulty understanding or expressing affective prosody is a critical issue for people with autism. This study was initiated with a question, how to improve emotional communications of children with autism with technological aids. Researchers have encouraged the use of robots as new intervention tools for children with autism, but there was no study to empirically evaluate a robot compared to a traditional computer in the interventions. From these backgrounds, this study investigated the potentials of an animal robot for affective prosody recognition compared to a traditional PC simulator. For this pilot study, however, only neurotypical students participated. Participants recognized Ekman's basic emotions from both a dinosaur Robot, "Pleo" and a virtual simulator of the Pleo. The physical Pleo showed more promising recognition tendencies and was clearly favored over the virtual one. With this promising result, we may be able to leverage the other advantages of the robot in interventions for children with autism.