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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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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