Robots Teach Autistic Kids Social Skills

posys writes "Wired Magazine has an article showing how the eternal patience of robots lends itself well to teaching new social skills to autistic children. 'The researchers hope that the end result is a human-like robot that can act as a "social mediator" for autistic children, a steppingstone to improved social interaction with other children and adults. "KASPAR provides autistic children with reliability and predictability. Since there are no surprises, they feel safe and secure," Robins said, adding that the purpose is not to replace human interaction and contact but to enhance it. Robins has already tested some imitation and turn-taking games with the children and his preliminary findings are positive.'"

Re:Waste of effort

[datapharmer]

That is incredibly ignorant. I have known several autistic people and have befriended a couple and I have seen MAJOR improvements after just being patient and excusing their inappropriate reactions and eccentricities. Just recognizing when they say something funny or make an appropriate social reaction to an event and brushing off the rest without being critical led one kid I know to grow up and live a very normal life. He comes off as a little eccentric to people when they first meet him, but his autism makes him a bit obsessive which actually makes him a great worker in fields which require insane levels of concentration and attention to detail (like engineering) because he really gets into whatever he likes.

Autism does not mean stupid and does not mean broken. Autism comes in many different levels of severity and type and people with autism can be a huge asset to society, thus the time spent educating them in social graces is money well spent.

Re:Waste of effort

[nullCRC]

Sometimes that is not always the best way to reach autistic kids, nor the best learning setting. Many have difficulties with a "busy" or "loud" environment, which may set them off into a aggressive episode.

Counterproductive?

[rehtonAesoohC]

While I understand that while robots are infinitely patient and can help an autistic child learn on that basis, wouldn't that be counterproductive?

What I mean by that is that while robots are infinitely patient, society is not. An average person in social situations is not patient indefinitely, so why would we teach them that social situations mean perfect patience? I'm not trying to be mean-spirited or cruel sounding; I am genuinely curious as to whether or not these autistic children would grow up understanding that everyone everywhere can tolerate their quirks with infinite patience.

Then again, it might be a catch-22 in itself... Autistic child can't learn unless the teacher exudes perfect patience, human teacher can't accomplish that, child can't learn, etc.

But then again, maybe it's not so cut-and-dried as that and people could maybe work on being more patient? That would seem ideal to me.

Re:Fixing Autism?

[lantastik]

I have a three year old son that is autistic and one of the most misunderstood things about autism is that all kinds of autism are the same. There are so many types/levels of autism that literally no two cases are alike. For instance, my son is not necessarily anti-social, but he becomes over-stimulated very easily.

Too many loud sounds or too many people in a social situation will cause him to introvert and exhibit what some people might consider weird behavior. That is the only time he really becomes anti-social. I am not really sure how a robot with a set pattern will cope with the different types of autism. It would only be effective for certain children. ...to answer the parent though, not all autistic children have special abilities. That being said, socializing them would not necessarily decrease the abilities of those that have them (a la Rain Man), but it would divert their singular focus from that special ability.

Why not teach them the conditions as well?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, for some a robot would be better, but for some autistics is would be a lot more clearcut to just know the conditional "flowchart" for the responses so that they can predict them with less effort.

Whilst this can seem like a strange idea do remember that many (maybe even most) autistics can follow the flow of sourcecode and checklists with relativly little effort, so why not give them the list of conditions and responses that the robot is set to follow and allow them to absorb that as well?

Autism spectrum

[benhocking]

I believe current theory is that most people with autism have interconnection problems, actually. I.e., the various regions of the brain are not communicating well with each other. However, the label "autism" is often about as specific as the label "cancer". That is, I'm quite certain there are several different development disorders that have been lumped under the same label. If you go to a school for children with autism (my wife works in one), you'll notice that these children are more different from each other than the "typical" child with autism is different from a "typical" child without autism. The only things they all have in common are the conditions that were necessary for them to be labelled as having autism in the first place. Some of them have severe mental deficiencies. Others are capable of earning a Ph.D. [templegrandin.com] Most of them, however, at least appear to have lower mental functioning than the typically developing child. (By "appear", I mean by an impartial observer using the tools they have available to them. Unfortunately, the impartial observer cannot always understand the way to communicate to a particular child with autism or the way to interpret such a child's actions. OTOH, a "partial" observer is subject to the typical problems associated with being partial - including a desire to believe that a child has more potential than he or she might actually have.)

Re:Autism

[Jhon]

And what's the difference between having social skills and being able to fake having social skills?

Alert: Speaking as someone with Aspergers!

From an outside observer, not much. From the INSIDE, it's an un-natural mechanism we learn to allow us to relate to others. It's a weird 'dance' that is never natural -- and if you hang around us enough, you'll notice repeats in virtually the exact same way. If we don't do the 'dance', we can't get to the 'stuff' we want.

Example:

Person: "Hi Jhon! How are you?"
Me: "Been better... been worse, can't complain"
Person: "Why do you always answer that?"
Me: "Because you always ask the same question.".

Actually, I'm not as bad as others on the spectrum (socially, that is). I'm lucky. I CAN emote quite well in writing, and pick up all kinds of queues in writing that I don't from faces of vocal inflections. If you see me pause after you say something to me it's probably me 'transcribing' the 'spoken word' to a 'pad' in my head which I then read-back to myself.

I got my wife to fall for me through daily letters. Happily married 10 years + 2 kids (+ another on the way), thank you! But god bless her, I'm not an easy person to live with!

Granted, we're talking about a SPECTRUM disorder -- most of my problems are related to perception of 'natural queues'. Others on the spectrum can have a variety of problems in addition...

Give me prunes or give me death

[tepples]

Considering that most 'actual' physical slights from autism stem from exceptional sensory input of some type (and probably the lack of neural pruning this causes), how would you test for this in a way that didn't penalize normal people somehow?

Under a system like that of ancient Rome (which, again, I do not advocate), autistic children are not punished for having exceptional sensory input. They are punished for not being able to prune.