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R2C3, A Rehabilitation Robotic Companion for Children and Caregivers: The Collaborative Design of a Social Robot for Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders

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Abstract

Neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) are a group of conditions affecting children’s neurodevelopment with consequences on personal, social, and educational functioning. Social robots have been used in the rehabilitation of children with NDD with encouraging results on learning outcomes. This study aims at understanding how a social robot should act to support caregivers during the rehabilitation of children with NDD. Through a Design-Based-Research approach, we investigate this question by considering the point of view of the most concerned and expert people, i.e., children with NDD and their caregivers. We present here the collaborative and iterative design of R2C3, a social robot used to support caregivers and children during rehabilitation sessions in a learning-by-teaching scenario. 27 caregivers and 6 children participated in the iterative design and/or the evaluation of R2C3, that resulted in the development of a Wizard-of-Oz interface and a library containing 120 robot behaviors. We then studied how caregivers used such behaviors during the rehabilitation sessions. We found they mainly used the robot to provide positive reinforcements to children, to elicit their reflection and knowledge toward shared handwriting activities, and to support children’s error acceptance. However, the utilization of Positive Reinforcement by caregivers tends to decrease significantly as the sessions progress.

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Notes

  1. Dynamilis website: https://dynamilis.com.

  2. ROS, Robot Operating System: https://ros.org/.

  3. rosbag: http://wiki.ros.org/rosbag.

  4. https://www.thematicanalysis.net/.

  5. iReCheck Project repository: https://github.com/irecheck/irecheck.

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Acknowledgements

Authors thank the EPFL team working in the iReCheck Project: Prof. Pierre Dillenbourg, Dr. Barbara Bruno, Dr. Daniel Tozadore and Chenyang Wang. Authors want to thank the Dynamilis team for their collaboration.

Funding

This work is financed by the bilateral French-Swiss ANR-FNS project iReCheck, Grant No. ANR-19-CE19-0029—FNS 200021E 189475/1. The study was reviewed and approved by the ethics committee of Sorbonne University, ID: CER-2020–103. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. Data will be made available on reasonable request to the authors of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire de Cognitions Humaine et Artificielle (CHArt), Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France

    Jianling Zou, Dominique Archambault & Salvatore M. Anzalone

  2. Service de Psychiatrie de L’Enfant et de L’Adolescent, Hopital Universitaire de Tours, Tours, France

    Thomas Gargot

  3. Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (ISIR), Sorbonne Université, Paris, France

    Mohamed Chetouani

  4. Service de Psychiatrie de L’Enfant et de L’Adolescent (SPEA-PSL), Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, AP-HP, Paris, France

    Soizic Gauthier, Hugues Pellerin & David Cohen

  5. Forward College, Paris, France

    Soizic Gauthier

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Correspondence to Salvatore M. Anzalone.

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Zou, J., Gauthier, S., Pellerin, H. et al. R2C3, A Rehabilitation Robotic Companion for Children and Caregivers: The Collaborative Design of a Social Robot for Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders. Int J of Soc Robotics 16, 599–617 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-024-01104-6

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