Fátima Moreira

Applications of simple robots to encourage social receptiveness of adolescents with autism

This paper reports the preliminary research studies regarding the use of LEGO Mindstorms TM robots as a therapy for autistic young people. Most autistic people hardly communicate in a social environment, living in their own world. This is the first step in a broader project which aims to improve the autistic people social life and also their ability to communicate, using the robot as a social bridge between them and the surrounding environment/people. The target group is 17-19 years old having autism disorder and developmental disability. The trials consists of undemanding plays where the intervention of the autistic person is required, using simple inputs, such as voice commands, pressing a button or clapping hands. The presented work intends to evaluate the reaction of this particular target group to the introduction of a toy-like robot in their classroom daily life. The methodology applied, the detailed description as well as the analysis of the experiments are presented and discussed.

An approach to promote social and communication behaviors in children with autism spectrum disorders: Robot based intervention

Most autistic people present some difficulties in developing social behavior, living in their own world. This study has the goal to improve the social life of children with autism with a main focus in promoting their social interaction and communication. It is necessary to call for childrens attention and enforce their collaboration, where a robot, LEGO MindStorm, behaves as a mediator/promoter of this interaction. A set of experiments designed to share objects and fulfill simple orders, by the 11 years old autistic child at the time of daily routine work and in-game with the robot, are described. The generalization of the acquired skills by the child in new contexts and environments are also tested. Results are described showing the outcomes of the experiments.

Development of skills in children with ASD using a robotic platform

The interaction and communication skills are essential to live in society. However, individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have a gap in these abilities which affects their daily life. Previous studies suggest that children with ASD demonstrate some positive behaviors in presence of a robotic platform. This study intends to evaluate the effect of a robotic platform on children with ASD, checking if the platform can be a stimulating agent for childrens interaction, as well as a skill learning promoter. So, it is used the robot Lego Mindstorms NXT as a mediator/reward to encourage children with ASD to interact with others and also to learn some cognitive skills.

Robotic Tool to Improve Skills in Children with ASD: A Preliminary Study

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) may present some difficulties in developing social behaviours, communicating with others and acquiring cognitive skills. In this study, we test the introduction of a robot Lego Mindstorms NXT as a mediator and/or positive reinforcement in the intervention of children with ASD in triadic interventions. The goal was to improve their academic skills and to transfer the acquired skills to their daily lives. Three case studies with 8-13 years old children are presented and discussed. The explored target skills were the concept of quantity, colour awareness and a gesture to make a request. Parents had an active participatory role in this study, especially in the Skill Transfer Phase.

Experimental evaluation of the impact of processor faults on parallel applications

This paper addresses the problem of processor faults in distributed memory parallel systems. It shows that transient faults injected at the processor pins of one node of a commercial parallel computer, without any particular fault-tolerant techniques, can cause erroneous application results for up to 43% of the injected faults (depending on the application). In addition to these very subtle faults, up to 19% of the injected faults (almost independent on the application) caused the system to hang up. These results show that fault-tolerant techniques are absolutely required in parallel systems, not only to ensure the completion of long-run applications but, and more important, to achieve confidence in the application results. The benefits of including some fairly simple behaviour based error detection mechanisms in the system were evaluated together with Algorithm Based Fault Tolerance (ABFT) techniques. The inclusion of such Mechanisms in parallel systems seems to be very important for detecting most of those subtle errors without greatly affecting the performance and the cost of these systems.

Technology and special educational needs: Let's play “Doing Good Deeds!”

“Doing Good Deeds!” is a game directed to children with special needs, in pre and elementary school age that aims to promote the development of social skills in different contexts. Structurally, this game has available a set of Avatars that players can choose to represent them. To adapt the game to each child, an administration module was developed, corresponding to the back office of the game, which allows the educator to create or change contexts, difficulty levels and sequences. This module includes also the visualization of the user performance, in particular the duration of each game, the number of attempts with and without success, allowing the educator to analyze the progress of each player.