Rob’Autism: How to Change Autistic Social Skills in 20 Weeks

Rob’Autism proposes an approach to improve social skills of people with autistic spectrum disorders. The program focuses on linking voice to gestures, and checks the emotional effects of this linkage. Rob’Autism is divided into 20 sessions of 1 h each, alternating preparatory sessions and robotics sessions. During the preparatory sessions, the subjects register their voices reading a story. During the robotics sessions, the subjects program the robot gestures according to the registered voices. In this program, the robots are used as an extension, and not as a companion as traditionally performed in other research programs. Consequently, the subjects immediately use it for their communication with others, showing consequent improvements of their communication skills, inside and outside the sessions, in a very short time. The program has also proven to length in time, as 6 months after its end, its effects on the subjects can still be observed. This article review the preliminary results of Rob’Autism, validated with 6 young test subjects with autism, aged 11–15.