Development of therapeutic expression for a cat robot in the treatment of autism spectrum disorders

The purpose of this research is to develop a therapeutic expression for the use of early treatment that will improve the social interactions of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In order to satisfy the purpose, we choose a cat character after surveying requirements and summarize the required actions for a treatment as hugging, eye contacts, copies of body movements and reactions to negative behaviours. The robot has a face mechanism that can express the emotion and a body mechanism to perform hand gesture. We also designed a system controller and sensor interfaces to control its body or interact with children. All the use history of the robot is stored at the memory device to analyze the play patterns of the patient and also used to make the treatment program that can be utilized in the specialized clinic. In this study, the therapeutic expression for the treatment of ASD is suggested and ported in a cat robot, and verified with real action experiment of those functions. This study is kinds of preliminary result before developing a treatment therapy for ASD children using perfect cat robot that has outer skin and furry coat, and followed by expression research for the suitable program that can be applied in the real treatment field.