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An Overview of Socially Assistive Robotics for Special Education

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Social Robotics (ICSR 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13818))

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Abstract

Social Robots have been used in applications such as healthcare, education, services, and entertainment. Among all these, Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) have proved to have significant impact in the assistance to people with learning disabilities or difficulties. This paper aims to provide an overview of the studies on SARs for people with Special Education Needs. We analyzed the role of SARs as a buddy, therapeutic assistant, and coach in various educational settings, with emphasis on children. We extracted data on aim, methods, challenges, outcomes, and the role of robots for a set of featured studies. The majority of presented experiments showed improvements in the participants’ performance or abilities, their engagement, and interaction with peers during robotics sessions. Current trends in the development and design of Socially Assistive Robots such as the NAO and Pepper Robot show how they can be used to aid people with Special Education Needs. However, these robots still face major challenges such as the limited assessment on long-term effect and the few variations of use-cases analysed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/special-educational-needs-in-england.

  2. 2.

    Mental retardation, now referred to as intellectual disability in the US and learning disability in the UK [31].

  3. 3.

    The current British nomenclature establishes learning disabilities (USA) as “learning difficulties” and call intellectual disabilities (USA) as “learning disabilities” [11].

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Engineering, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Shyamli Suneesh

  2. Faculty of Environment and Technology, Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

    Virginia Ruiz Garate

Authors
  1. Shyamli Suneesh
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  2. Virginia Ruiz Garate
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shyamli Suneesh .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Filippo Cavallo

  2. Qatar University, Doha, Qatar

    John-John Cabibihan

  3. University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Laura Fiorini

  4. University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Alessandra Sorrentino

  5. Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, USA

    Hongsheng He

  6. Qingdao University, Qingdao, China

    Xiaorui Liu

  7. National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Japan

    Yoshio Matsumoto

  8. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Shuzhi Sam Ge

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Suneesh, S., Ruiz Garate, V. (2022). An Overview of Socially Assistive Robotics for Special Education. In: Cavallo, F., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13818. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24670-8_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24670-8_17

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-24669-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-24670-8

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