An Educational Robotic Assistant for Supporting Therapy Sessions of Children with Communication Disorders

摘要

Nowadays the communication disorders affect million people worldwide. This situation is a reality even in developed countries such as the United States of America (40 million persons in general), the United Kingdom (1 million children), Australia (1.1 million), among many others. However, in several South American countries, such as Ecuador, there are not even comparative statistics regarding the number of children that present communication disorders. But each year hundreds of children join schools with different difficulties, of which the most common is the Dyslalia. For these reasons, in this paper, we present a new approach to engage children to participate in therapies with the support of a robotic assistant. This proposal was put to the test with ten children divided into two groups (control and pilot) during two months of therapy. The achieved results are encouraging.