Jasmina Stošić

Accessing parental perspectives to inform the development of parent training in autism in south-eastern Europe

Abstract Parent training has been shown to be an important means of supporting families living with autism – but such services are not universally accessible. A multinational project funded by the European Commission has been developed in order to establish such parent training in three south-eastern European countries. To ensure that the training was relevant and appropriate, a survey was carried out in autumn 2015 to ascertain the attitudes of parents of children with autism in Croatia, Cyprus and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia regarding this issue, and to identify the areas of training that they felt most important. Two hundred and fifty-three surveys were distributed, and 148 were returned, a response rate of 58%. Respondents in the three counties were overwhelmingly positive about parent training, with almost 90% stating that they would like to attend such training. Weekend training sessions were preferred by the majority of respondents. There was wide variation between the three countries with regard to what content was felt important to be included, with parents in the FYR of Macedonia seeking information in the greatest number of areas. Five topics were prioritised by parents across all three countries. These were:• Strategies for enhancing my child’s communication• Strategies on facilitating my child’s interaction with other children• Sensory integration and development• General information on behavioural management strategies• Identifying and/or developing socialisation opportunities

Four Tasks of a Robot-assisted Autism Spectrum Disorder Diagnostic Protocol: First Clinical Tests

Notwithstanding intensive research and many scientific advances, diagnosing autism spectrum disorders remains a slow and tedious process. Due to the absence of any physiological tests, the outcome depends solely on the expertise of the clinician, which takes years to acquire. Complicating the matter further, research has shown that inter-rater reliability can be very low, even among experienced clinicians. As an attempt to facilitate the diagnostic process and make it more objective, this paper proposes a robot-assisted diagnostic protocol. The expected benefit of using a robot is twofold: the robot always performs its actions in a predictable and consistent way, and it can use its sensors to catch aspects of a childs behavior that a human examiner can miss. In this paper, we describe four tasks from the widely accepted ADOS protocol, that have been adapted to make them suitable for the Aldebaran Nao humanoid robot. These tasks include evaluating the childs response to being called by name, symbolic and functional imitation, joint attention and assessing the childs ability to simultaneously communicate on multiple channels. All four tasks have been implemented on the robots onboard computer and are performed autonomously. As the main contribution of the paper, we present the results of the initial batch of four clinical trials of the proposed robot assisted diagnostic protocol, performed on a population of preschool children. The results of the robots observations are benchmarked against the findings of experienced clinicians. Emphasis is placed on evaluating robot performance, in order to assess the feasibility of a robot eventually becoming an assistant in the diagnostic process. The obtained results indicate that the use of robots as autism diagnostic assistants is a promising approach, but much work remains to be done before they become useful diagnostic tools.