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It has been argued that clinical applications of advanced technology may hold promise for addressing impairments associated with autism spectrum disorders. This pilot feasibility study evaluated the application of a novel adaptive robot-mediated system capable of both administering and automatically adjusting joint attention prompts to a small group of preschool children with autism spectrum disorders (n = 6) and a control group (n = 6). Children in both groups spent more time looking at the humanoid robot and were able to achieve a high level of accuracy across trials. However, across groups, children required higher levels of prompting to successfully orient within robot-administered trials. The results highlight both the potential benefits of closed-loop adaptive robotic systems as well as current limitations of existing humanoid-robotic platforms.
Bekele et al. (Tue,) studied this question.