As the operation of robots is becoming easier, adopting a robot as a companion for families is increasing. When considering that family playtime has a positive influence on all family members, it is important to provide various activities for families to play together. Robots might mediate fun activities to increase family playtime. Therefore, this research was designed to compare play activities between dyadic child-robot interactions and family-robot interactions. We explored the possible activities for family playtime with a NAO robot. The results from three family groups showed that verbal activities, such as giving an instruction to a robot and talking to a robot, increased when family members are playing together with the robot. Also, increased physical activities were involving all family members, such as giving and receiving balls. Therefore, it will be necessary for a robot to recognize the voices of multiple family members and respond to each member appropriately. More importantly, a robot's time allocation for each family member and encouraging the participation of all members will be necessary to maintain or Increase the family playtime.

Although socially assistive robots are popularly studied as a powerful tool in therapeutic activities for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), there are several challenges particularly in automation of the robot's behavior due to difficulties of sensing children's social behaviors by the robotic agent. We developed measurement methods to quantitatively measure children's social behaviors, such as smiling and facing behavior, by means of a wearable device and an image processing. Smiling, facing behavior and their synchrony are usually considered as important social behaviors that imply positive affect and engagement of the participant during the therapeutic intervention. Therefore, the proposed approach would contribute not only to develop the robotic agent which is capable of performing in response to social behaviors of children with ASD, but also to support an evidence-based therapeutic intervention. In this article, the measurement performance of the proposed methods were verified by experiments with ten children with ASD, and the relationship between their smile and facing behavior were analyzed.

This paper introduces a doll-type interface for real-time teleoperation of a humanoid robot in Robot-Assisted Activity (RAA) for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). We developed a prototype of the interface and verified its usability by conducting RAA sessions with children with ASD.

Recent studies on autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have reported that positive emotions can be a good incentive for children with ASD to perform spontaneous positive social behaviors. Based on this findings, we propose an affective robot-assisted activity (ARAA) for fostering social interaction and communication skills among children with ASD by promoting their positive emotional responses through interaction with a robot. As it has been termed spectrum, every child has different social and affective characteristics that should be taken into account. However, due to difficulties in programming the robot's behavior, conventional RAA systems did not allow the therapist to customize the activity according to the characteristics of each individual. To tackle this problem, we developed a comprehensive framework of ARAA that consists of (i) a robot tele-operation method that allows a therapist to improvise a robot's behavior in real-time and (ii) a quantitative measurement method to describe social interaction within both behavioral and affective aspects.