AUTISTHERAPIBOT: A New Robotic Approach for Autistic Children

Recent studies unravels that there are a lot of negative implications happen in those children who suffers from Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) which include Asperger and Kanner Syndrome. All these syndromes shares similar characteristics which are difficulties in socialization, communications and repetitive inflexible behaviors. This problem leads to difficulties in learning especially to those children suffering from autistic disorder. Thus, the objective of this project is to investigate the current teaching method used by the autism therapists in Perak at the selected special school and is to develop an autonomous robotic system to aid the teaching and learning process of autistic children in Malaysia. The LEGO Mindstorm NXT is used as an alternative approach in educating those children with ASD namely those in the Asperger range since Asperger is more common compared to Kanner. The prototype, is tested on a group of autistic kids from selected public and private autism institution. The project focuses on how to attract the autistic children and sustain their learning via the usage of robotic application such as the LEGO Mindstorm NXT. In a preliminary investigation, multiple robotic designs and programming approach are experimented to produce a robotic application that can engage with the target autistic children in order to facilitate their process of learning via the intervention of their therapists. Interviews with the therapists and live observation at the selected special school are conducted to understand the traditional learning process that are used by the therapists and identify the weaknesses in it to improvise it. The results from the investigation and tests shows that this robotic systems helps a lot in assisting the therapist in educating autistic children and scores way better if compared to the current methods they are using. The significance of this robotic application is to fulfill the depravedness in the learning capabilities of the autistic children and also to assist the therapists in their daily routine.