NAO-Dance Therapy for Children with ASD.

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have very short attention span, and autism therapy requires the entertainment for longer interaction for them. Robots draw their attention to focus on the therapy and learn the social skills. In this paper, NAO is used for as part of a dance therapy for children with ASD. To explore the effectiveness, we compared three settings involving NAO, therapist and/or unfamiliar person, during the dance. Our results indicate that a robot can be an effective education agent for children with ASD, and in particular, as part of the dance therapy.