Abdelmohsen, Maha Hatem Mohamed (2021) Enhancing social skills of children with HFA using assistive technology. PhD thesis, University of Greenwich.

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Abstract

Social skills training (SST) interventions are crucial to train and enhance the social skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). SST interventions provide learning experiences to teach children the necessary skills to interact successfully with their social environment. Although traditional SST interventions were proven to be beneficial for children with ASD by many previous studies, their availability is limited. In recent years, physical social robots and virtual environments (VE) have been popular training tools for children with ASD. Studies were conducted to evaluate their effectiveness in enhancing the social skills of children with ASD. This research investigates the impact of combining a virtual
environment with a virtual social robot (VRobot) as a hybrid approach to train the social skills of children with high-functioning autism (HFA). A non-immersive virtual environment (Jammo-VRobot environment) that employs a 3D robot (Jammo VRobot) was designed. Jammo-VRobot environment aims to enhance the social skills of children with HFA through a social skills training programme guided by a parent or a teacher. This research aims to provide a tool that can be widely available, cheap, and easily used by parents and teachers either at home or school. The designed social skill training programme is adapted and modified from successful work done with physical robots (NAO, Zeno, and Qtrobot) to train the social skills of children with ASD. The developed training programme targets three social skills: imitation, emotion recognition and expression, and intransitive gestures. The evaluation process was conducted mostly online with some on-site, including 15 children
with HFA (aged 4-12 years). The participants were taught to recognise six basic emotions and 11 intransitive gestures (Phase I), to imitate these emotions and gestures (Phase II), and to express and demonstrate them in social situations (Phase III). The experimental sessions reveal encouraging results showing that the Jammo-VRobot environment helps in training and enhancing the target three skills of the participants. Additionally, similar results
were found by comparing the results achieved through interaction with Jammo VRobot and those achieved through interaction with physical robots used by SoA. The findings indicate that Jammo-VRobot is as effective as the physical robots in training and enhancing the social skills of children with HFA. It also emphasises that the Jammo-VRobot environment overcame some limitations of social robots and immersive VE environments in terms of availability and cost.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Social skills training (SST), autism spectrum disorder, immersive VE environments,
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Engineering & Science Faculty of Engineering & Science > School of Computing & Mathematical Sciences (CMS)
Last Modified:	30 Jun 2022 15:27
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/36795

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