Abstract
Music-based therapy is an appropriate tool to facilitate multisystem development in children with autism. The focus of this study is to implement a systematic and hierarchical music-based scenario in order to teach the fundamentals of music to children with autism through a social robot. To this end, we have programmed a NAO robot to play the xylophone and the drum. After running our designed robot-assisted clinical interventions on three high-functioning and one low functioning autistic children, fairly promising results have been observed. We indicated that the high-functioning participants have learned how to play the musical notes, short sentences, and simple rhythms. Moreover, the program affected positively on autism severity, fine movement and communication skills of the autistic subjects. The initial results observed indicate promising potentials for involving social robots in music-based autism therapy.
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Notes
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Graphical User Interface .
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Typically Developing.
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Acknowledgement
Our sincere appreciation is extended to the “Cognitive Sciences and Technologies Council of Iran” for their financial support through research grant # 103. We also acknowledge the “Center for the Treatment of Autistic Disorders (CTAD)” and its psychologists for their technical support and cooperation in participating in the clinical interventions with the children with autism spectrum disorders.
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Taheri, A., Meghdari, A., Alemi, M., Pouretemad, H., Poorgoldooz, P., Roohbakhsh, M. (2016). Social Robots and Teaching Music to Autistic Children: Myth or Reality?. In: Agah, A., Cabibihan, JJ., Howard, A., Salichs, M., He, H. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9979. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47437-3_53
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