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Promoting Social Engagement With a Multi-Role Dancing Robot for In-Home Autism Care

This work describes the design of real-time dance-based interaction with a humanoid robot, where the robot seeks to promote physical activity in children by taking on multiple roles as a dance partner. It acts as a leader by initiating dances but can also act as a follower by mimicking a child’s dan...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Javed, Hifza, Park, Chung Hyuk
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9532014/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36203792
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2022.880691
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author Javed, Hifza
Park, Chung Hyuk
author_facet Javed, Hifza
Park, Chung Hyuk
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description This work describes the design of real-time dance-based interaction with a humanoid robot, where the robot seeks to promote physical activity in children by taking on multiple roles as a dance partner. It acts as a leader by initiating dances but can also act as a follower by mimicking a child’s dance movements. Dances in the leader role are produced by a sequence-to-sequence (S2S) Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network trained on children’s music videos taken from YouTube. On the other hand, a music orchestration platform is implemented to generate background music in the follower mode as the robot mimics the child’s poses. In doing so, we also incorporated the largely unexplored paradigm of learning-by-teaching by including multiple robot roles that allow the child to both learn from and teach to the robot. Our work is among the first to implement a largely autonomous, real-time full-body dance interaction with a bipedal humanoid robot that also explores the impact of the robot roles on child engagement. Importantly, we also incorporated in our design formal constructs taken from autism therapy, such as the least-to-most prompting hierarchy, reinforcements for positive behaviors, and a time delay to make behavioral observations. We implemented a multimodal child engagement model that encompasses both affective engagement (displayed through eye gaze focus and facial expressions) as well as task engagement (determined by the level of physical activity) to determine child engagement states. We then conducted a virtual exploratory user study to evaluate the impact of mixed robot roles on user engagement and found no statistically significant difference in the children’s engagement in single-role and multiple-role interactions. While the children were observed to respond positively to both robot behaviors, they preferred the music-driven leader role over the movement-driven follower role, a result that can partly be attributed to the virtual nature of the study. Our findings support the utility of such a platform in practicing physical activity but indicate that further research is necessary to fully explore the impact of each robot role.
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spelling pubmed-95320142022-10-05 Promoting Social Engagement With a Multi-Role Dancing Robot for In-Home Autism Care Javed, Hifza Park, Chung Hyuk Front Robot AI Robotics and AI This work describes the design of real-time dance-based interaction with a humanoid robot, where the robot seeks to promote physical activity in children by taking on multiple roles as a dance partner. It acts as a leader by initiating dances but can also act as a follower by mimicking a child’s dance movements. Dances in the leader role are produced by a sequence-to-sequence (S2S) Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network trained on children’s music videos taken from YouTube. On the other hand, a music orchestration platform is implemented to generate background music in the follower mode as the robot mimics the child’s poses. In doing so, we also incorporated the largely unexplored paradigm of learning-by-teaching by including multiple robot roles that allow the child to both learn from and teach to the robot. Our work is among the first to implement a largely autonomous, real-time full-body dance interaction with a bipedal humanoid robot that also explores the impact of the robot roles on child engagement. Importantly, we also incorporated in our design formal constructs taken from autism therapy, such as the least-to-most prompting hierarchy, reinforcements for positive behaviors, and a time delay to make behavioral observations. We implemented a multimodal child engagement model that encompasses both affective engagement (displayed through eye gaze focus and facial expressions) as well as task engagement (determined by the level of physical activity) to determine child engagement states. We then conducted a virtual exploratory user study to evaluate the impact of mixed robot roles on user engagement and found no statistically significant difference in the children’s engagement in single-role and multiple-role interactions. While the children were observed to respond positively to both robot behaviors, they preferred the music-driven leader role over the movement-driven follower role, a result that can partly be attributed to the virtual nature of the study. Our findings support the utility of such a platform in practicing physical activity but indicate that further research is necessary to fully explore the impact of each robot role. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-06-20 /pmc/articles/PMC9532014/ /pubmed/36203792 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2022.880691 Text en Copyright © 2022 Javed and Park. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Robotics and AI
Javed, Hifza
Park, Chung Hyuk
Promoting Social Engagement With a Multi-Role Dancing Robot for In-Home Autism Care
title Promoting Social Engagement With a Multi-Role Dancing Robot for In-Home Autism Care
title_full Promoting Social Engagement With a Multi-Role Dancing Robot for In-Home Autism Care
title_fullStr Promoting Social Engagement With a Multi-Role Dancing Robot for In-Home Autism Care
title_full_unstemmed Promoting Social Engagement With a Multi-Role Dancing Robot for In-Home Autism Care
title_short Promoting Social Engagement With a Multi-Role Dancing Robot for In-Home Autism Care
title_sort promoting social engagement with a multi-role dancing robot for in-home autism care
topic Robotics and AI
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9532014/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36203792
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2022.880691
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