Social Personalized Human-Machine Interaction for People with Autism

Abstract

My PhD research aims to develop a new personalized social interaction model between a humanoid robot and/or a virtual agent and an individual (child and/or adult) suffering of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), so as to enhance his/her social and communication skills. Because of the variability of the syndrome among the ASD population, our objective is to propose a customized social interaction for each individual. Previous studies explored the link between the individual integration of proprioceptive and visual feedbacks and communication, interactions skills, and emotions recognition [1], [2]. In light of the ASD impact on vision and motor processing [3], [4] and in order to define individual's profile, we posit that the individual's reliance to proprioceptive and kinematic visual cues will affect the way he/she interacts with a social agent. In our work, a first experiment that defines each participants' perceptivo-cognitive and sensorimotor profile with respect to the integration of visual inputs has already been conducted. Our next work will focus on developing appropriate agent behaviors that fit the user's profile.