Browsing by Author "Howard, Ayanna M."

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Audio-based Emotion Estimation for Interactive Robotic Therapy for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
    Kim, Jonathan C.; Azzi, Paul; Jeon, Myounghoon; Howard, Ayanna M.; Park, Chung Hyuk (IEEE, 2017-01-01)
    Recently, efforts in the development of speech recognition systems and robots have come to fruition with an overflow of applications in our daily lives. However, we are still far from achieving natural interaction between humans and robots, given that robots do not take into account the emotional state of speakers. The objective of this research is to create an automatic emotion classifier integrated with a robot, such that the robot can understand the emotional state of a human user by analyzing the speech signals from the user. This becomes particularly relevant in the realm of using assistive robotics to tailor therapeutic techniques towards assisting children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Over the past two decades, the number of children being diagnosed with ASD has been rapidly increasing, yet the clinical and societal support have not been enough to cope with the needs. Therefore, finding alternative, affordable, and accessible means of therapy and assistance has become more of a concern. Improving audio-based emotion prediction for children with ASD will allow for the robotic system to properly assess the engagement level of the child and modify its responses to maximize the quality of interaction between the robot and the child and sustain an interactive learning environment.
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    Love at First Sight: Mere Exposure to Robot Appearance Leaves Impressions Similar to Interactions with Physical Robots
    Hosseini, S. Maryam Fakhr; Hilliger, Samantha; Barnes, Jaclyn; Jeon, Myounghoon; Park, Chung Hyuk; Howard, Ayanna M. (IEEE, 2017-01-01)
    As the technology needed to make robots robust and affordable draws ever nearer, human-robot interaction (HRI) research to make robots more useful and accessible to the general population becomes more crucial. In this study, 59 college students filled out an online survey soliciting their judgments regarding seven social robots based solely on appearance. Results suggest that participants prefer robots that resemble animals or humans over those that are intended to represent an imaginary creature or do not resemble a creature at all. Results are discussed based on social robot application and design features.
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    Musical Robots For Children With ASD Using A Client-Server Architecture
    Zhang, Ruimin; Barnes, Jaclyn; Ryan, Joseph; Jeon, Myounghoon; Park, Chung Hyuk; Howard, Ayanna M. (The International Community for Auditory Display, 2016-07)
    People with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are known to have difficulty recognizing and expressing emotions, which affects their social integration. Leveraging the recent advances in interactive robot and music therapy approaches, and integrating both, we have designed musical robots that can facilitate social and emotional interactions of children with ASD. Robots communicate with children with ASD while detecting their emotional states and physical activities and then, make real-time sonification based on the interaction data. Given that we envision the use of multiple robots with children, we have adopted a client-server architecture. Each robot and sensing device plays a role as a terminal, while the sonification server processes all the data and generates harmonized sonification. After describing our goals for the use of sonification, we detail the system architecture and on-going research scenarios. We believe that the present paper offers a new perspective on the sonification application for assistive technologies.
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    A Robotic Framework to Facilitate Sensory Experiences for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Preliminary Study
    Javed, Hifza; Burns, Rachael; Jeon, Myounghoon; Howard, Ayanna M.; Park, Chung Hyuk (ACM, 2020-01)
    The diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in children is commonly accompanied by a diagnosis of sensory processing disorders. Abnormalities are usually reported in multiple sensory processing domains, showing a higher prevalence of unusual responses, particularly to tactile, auditory and visual stimuli. This paper discusses a novel robot-based framework designed to target sensory difficulties faced by children with ASD in a controlled setting. The setup consists of a number of sensory stations, together with two different robotic agents that navigate the stations and interact with the stimuli. These stimuli are designed to resemble real world scenarios that form a common part of one's everyday experiences. Given the strong interest of children with ASD in technology in general and robots in particular, we attempt to utilize our robotic platform to demonstrate socially acceptable responses to the stimuli in an interactive, pedagogical setting that encourages the child's social, motor and vocal skills, while providing a diverse sensory experience. A preliminary user study was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed framework, with a total of 18 participants (5 with ASD and 13 typically developing) between the ages of 4 and 12 years. We derive a measure of social engagement, based on which we evaluate the effectiveness of the robots and sensory stations in order to identify key design features that can improve social engagement in children.