AsiRo-μ: A Multi-purpose Robotic Assistant for Educational Inclusion of Children with Multiple Disabilities

Abstract

Nowadays, artificial intelligence is a tool widely used in several areas such as medicine, personal assistance, regular/special education, leisure, among many others. Additive manufacturing development allows designing and making innovative low-cost robotic assistants for educational inclusion processes in developing countries. There are not enough assistive technologies for special education centers in Ecuador due to the lack of resources. For these reasons, in this paper, we describe the robot AsiRo-μ (multi-purpose robotic assistant, for its Spanish name). AsiRo-μ is based on the open-source 3D printed robot Inmmov. It implements the following functionalities: hand gestures recognition, automatic speech recognition and text to speech function through the IBM Watson Cloud services, and gesture imitation. The robot aims to conduct a dialogue with the children, motivate them to carry out the exercises/rehabilitation activities, and motivate and engage them in the therapy sessions (for children with disabilities). To determine the children’s acceptance level, we carried out a pilot experiment with two groups of children. The first group consisted of 7 children with multiple disabilities (intellectual disability, Joubert syndrome, Down Syndrome, Autism, etc.), whereas in the second participated 30 children aged between 4 and 6 years (without disabilities). Each child interacted with the robot, and a group of experts evaluated the children’s perceptions.