Saleh Mohammed A, Hanapiah Fazah Akhtar, Hashim Habibah
Faculty ofElectrical Engineering, UiTM, Shah Alam, Malaysia.
Faculty of Medicine, UiTM, Shah Alam, Malaysia.
Disabil Rehabil Assist Technol. 2021 Aug;16(6):580-602. doi: 10.1080/17483107.2019.1685016. Epub 2020 Jul 24.
Technological advances in robotics have brought about exciting developments in different areas such as education, training, and therapy. Recent research has suggested that the robot can be even more effective in rehabilitation, therapy, and education for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In this paper, a comprehensive review of robotic technology for children with ASD is presented wherein a large number of journals and conference proceedings in science and engineering search engines' databases were implicated.
A search for related literature was conducted in three search engines' databases, Web of Science, Scopus, and IEEE Xplore. Thematic keywords were used to identify articles in the recent ten years in titles, keywords, and abstracts. The retrieved articles were filtered, analysed, and evaluated based on specific inclusion and exclusion criteria.
A total of 208 studies were retrieved, while 166 met the inclusion criteria. The selected studies were reviewed according to the type of robot, the participants, objectives, and methods. 68 robots were used in all studies, NAO robot was used in 30.5% of those studies. The total number of participants in all studies was 1671. The highest percentage of the studies reviewed were dedicated to augmenting the learning skills.
Robots and the associated schemes were used to determine their feasibility and validity for augmenting the learning skills of autistic children. Most of the studies reviewed were focused on improving the social communication skills of autistic children and measuring the extent of robot mitigation of stereotyped autistic behaviours.Implications for rehabilitationSocial robots are not considered as promising tools to be utilized for rehabilitation of autistic children only, but also has been used for children and young people with severe intellectual disability.Rehabilitation for individuals with ASD using robots can augment their cognitive and social skills, but further studies should be conducted to clarify its effectiveness based on other factors such as sex, age and IQ of the participates.Robotic-based rehabilitation is not limited to the physical robots only, but virtual robots have been used also, whereas each of which can be used individually or simultaneously. However, further study is required to assess the extent of its efficiency and effectiveness for both cases.
机器人技术的进步在教育、培训和治疗等不同领域带来了令人兴奋的发展。最近的研究表明，机器人在自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）患者的康复、治疗和教育方面可能更有效。本文对用于ASD儿童的机器人技术进行了全面综述，其中涉及科学和工程搜索引擎数据库中的大量期刊和会议论文集。
在三个搜索引擎数据库，即科学网、Scopus和IEEE Xplore中搜索相关文献。使用主题关键词来识别近十年标题、关键词和摘要中的文章。根据特定的纳入和排除标准对检索到的文章进行筛选、分析和评估。
共检索到208项研究，其中166项符合纳入标准。根据机器人类型、参与者、目标和方法对所选研究进行了综述。所有研究中使用了68种机器人，其中30.5%的研究使用了NAO机器人。所有研究的参与者总数为1671人。所综述的研究中最高比例致力于提高学习技能。
使用机器人及相关方案来确定其在提高自闭症儿童学习技能方面的可行性和有效性。所综述的大多数研究集中于改善自闭症儿童的社交沟通技能以及衡量机器人减轻自闭症刻板行为的程度。
对康复的启示
社交机器人不仅被视为用于自闭症儿童康复的有前途的工具，也已用于重度智力残疾的儿童和年轻人。
使用机器人对ASD患者进行康复可以增强他们的认知和社交技能，但应进一步开展研究以根据参与者的性别、年龄和智商等其他因素阐明其有效性。
基于机器人技术的康复不仅限于实体机器人，也使用了虚拟机器人，而每种机器人都可以单独使用或同时使用。然而，需要进一步研究以评估这两种情况下其效率和有效性的程度。
