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International Conference on Social Robotics

ICSR 2021: Social Robotics pp 497–508Cite as

Virtual Social Robot Enhances the Social Skills of Children with HFA

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13086))

Abstract

Social skills are the skills that humans use to communicate with each other verbally and non-verbally. The deficit of social skills is a core symptom of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Physical social robots and virtual environments have been popular training tools for children with ASD in recent years.

The Jammo-VRobot environment is a virtual desktop environment that employs a 3D virtual humanoid robot (Jammo VRobot) to enhance the social skills of children with high-functioning autism (HFA) through a social skills training program guided by a parent or a teacher. The social skill training programme targets three social skills: imitation, emotion recognition and expression, and intransitive gesture. The evaluation process was conducted mostly online with some on-site, including children with HFA (aged 4–12 years). The experimental sessions reveal encouraging results showing that the Jammo-VRobot environment helps in training and enhancing the target three skills of the participants.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Greenwich, Park Row, Greenwich Peninsula, London, SE10 9LS, UK

    Maha Abdelmohsen & Yasmine Arafa

Authors
  1. Maha Abdelmohsen
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  2. Yasmine Arafa
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maha Abdelmohsen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronic and Communication Engineering, National University of Singapore, Faculty of Engineering, Singapore, Singapore

    Haizhou Li

  2. The National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Shuzhi Sam Ge

  3. A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, Singapore

    Yan Wu

  4. Center for Human Technologies, Istituto Italiano Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy

    Agnieszka Wykowska

  5. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, USA

    Hongsheng He

  6. Qingdao University, Qingdao, China

    Xiaorui Liu

  7. School of Cyber Science and Technology, Beihang University, Beijing, Beijing, China

    Dongyu Li

  8. Social Cognition Human-Robot Interaction, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy

    Jairo Perez-Osorio

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Cite this paper

Abdelmohsen, M., Arafa, Y. (2021). Virtual Social Robot Enhances the Social Skills of Children with HFA. In: Li, H., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13086. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90525-5_43

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90525-5_43

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-90524-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-90525-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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