Can Therapists Design Robot-Mediated Interventions and Teleoperate Robots Using VR to Deliver Interventions for ASD?
Roman Kulikovskiy, Megan Sochanski, Ala’aldin Hijaz, Matteson Eaton, Jessica Korneder, Wing-Yue Geoffrey Louie
Abstract
Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) have demonstrated success in the delivery of interventions to individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). To date, these robot-mediated interventions have primarily been designed and implemented by robotics researchers. It remains unclear whether therapists could independently utilize robots to deliver therapies in clinical settings. In this paper, we conducted a study to investigate whether therapists could design and implement robot-mediated interventions for children with ASD. Furthermore, we compared therapists’ performance, efficiency, and perceptions towards using a Virtual Reality (VR) and kinesthetic-based interface for delivering robot-mediated interventions. Overall, our results demonstrated therapists could independently design and implement interventions with a SAR. They were faster at designing a new intervention using VR than a kinesthetic interface. Therapists also had similar performance to delivering inperson interventions when utilizing VR to deliver interventions with the robot. Therapists reported moderate workload using the VR interface and perceived VR to be usable.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icra2021_cantherapistsdes,
title = {Can Therapists Design Robot-Mediated Interventions and Teleoperate Robots Using VR to Deliver Interventions for ASD?},
author = {Roman Kulikovskiy and Megan Sochanski and Ala’aldin Hijaz and Matteson Eaton and Jessica Korneder and Wing-Yue Geoffrey Louie},
booktitle = {ICRA 2021},
year = {2021}
}