Autistic Children's Kansei Responses Towards Humanoid-Robot as Teaching Mediator

Abstract

Autism is often being associated with the deficits in social communication, interaction as well as imagination. Autistic patients may experience the impairment in social interaction usually being related to their inability to interpret others’ emotion and even to express their own feelings. As a result, children with autism are often been labeled as lacking the ability to express their emotion. The main objective of this paper is to present a pilot study in studying the autistic children's’ emotions and feelings upon being triggered by the humanoid-robot, NAO. Kansei Engineering, which is a powerful emotion extraction mechanism is adopted in the study to assess the children's’ emotion. The experiment involved two autistic children and one normal child who were given four interaction modules in separate intervention session. The experiment conducted is to observe how robot triggers the emotion of these children. The result shows that different types of modules which would trigger different emotional reactions. This result provides a basis for further investigation of the assessment of autistic children's feeling and emotion. The result will ultimately contribute to finding best possible therapy for autistic children towards the used of humanoid-robot.