How robots can assist students with disabilities

Imagine: Robots that help teach social skills to children with autism. Translation software that provides deaf students with a more fluid and interactive experience. Data analysis to determine effective methods to identify those with dyslexia.

These tools, which all incorporate artificial intelligence, aim to find better ways to detect, teach and assist those with learning disabilities. Some are already in classrooms; others are still in the research phase.

Social robots, which are made to interact with humans, can help teach social and educational skills to students of all abilities, including those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, hearing impairments, Down syndrome and autism.

Addressing the needs of children on the autism spectrum is particularly urgent because of their sheer numbers; 1 in 54 children are diagnosed with autism, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And those students tend to respond to robots “in a way that they don’t to puppets or pet therapies or to many of the other kinds of things that we’ve tried,” said Brian Scassellati, a professor of computer science, cognitive science and mechanical engineering at Yale University.

That may be because robots seem humanlike but are nonjudgmental, he said. The robots come in a variety of designs, including a small boy, a classic sci-fi machine and a furry snowman, and they go by peppy names such as Kaspar, Nao and Zeno.

In a recent study by Scassellati and his colleagues, an early prototype of a robot named Jibo — which looks like a small table lamp with a round head that swivels in all directions and a glowing white circle on a touch screen as its face — worked every day for 30 days with 12 children and their caregivers. Jibo modeled social-gaze behavior, such as making eye contact and sharing attention, and provided feedback and guidance during six interactive games played on screens.

“The robot’s job was to adjust the difficulty of the game based on the child’s performance,” Scassellati said. But the idea isn’t that the robot replaces a teacher or caregiver. “We never want to encourage kids to just respond to the technology; that doesn’t do them any good,” he said. “We want to enable them to interact with people in a more substantial way.”

Research has found the robots help improve educational and social skills, but far more studies are needed to discover how to make these changes stick and translate to the real world.

Danielle Kovach, who teaches third-grade special education in Hopatcong, N.J, said she would be curious to see what further research shows. “So much of teaching social skills to students with autism is reading facial expressions, reading body languages and picking up on social cues of others. Is a robot able to mimic those things we learn from humans?” she said. Kovach is also the president of the Council for Exceptional Children, an organization of special education professionals.

There is a nascent marketplace aimed at classrooms and individuals. For example, LUXAI, a Luxembourg-based company, has been selling the friendlylooking Qtrobot, designed for children with autism, to parents since early 2021.

Children with autism interact with the robot daily for 10 minutes to an hour, depending on their age and level of support needed, said Aida Nazari, a co-founder of LUXAI. The company has sold a few hundred Qtrobots, primarily to families in the United States, she added. But the Qtrobot costs $2,000 plus a $129 monthly software subscription.

AI is also used in a simpler way to help those living with autism: through gaming. Maithilee Kunda, an assistant professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University, and her colleagues created a video game called “Film Detective,” which will be piloted this spring.

The concept: The player wakes up in the future — the year 3021 — and has to help a scientist and her robot sidekick catch a villain who is stealing items from the Museum of Human History. Their detective work involves using a series of film clips to decode how people in today’s world behave.

“Many with autism have superior visual thinking but have a lot of difficulty with social action,” Kunda said. “So we thought, what if we can give them visual ways to imagine theory of mind?” Theory of mind is the ability to imagine what other people are thinking or feeling — something those with autism can find particularly difficult.

The use of AI to improve visual and auditory accessibility is also evolving quickly.

For example, the National Technical Institute for the Deaf worked with Microsoft to customize technology and platforms that already existed in order to caption classes for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. The classes have sign language translators and stenographers, but more assistance was needed.

For the institute’s purposes, Microsoft Translator was “taught” specialized terminology used in classes as well as vocabulary specific to the university, such as the names of certain buildings and people, said Wendy Dannels, a member of the research faculty who is deaf.

With AI, the speech-to-written-word translation is far more fluent than automatic speech recognition used to be, she said. And the institute developed an app called Tiger chat. The app turns speech into text messages, making it easier to chat with friends.

A key use of AI in special education is its ability to detect patterns in large amounts of data to better identify and define certain disabilities.

Take dyslexia, for example. Those with the condition typically have reading difficulties because they have trouble connecting the letters and words on the page to the corresponding sounds they represent.

The most widely used assessment for dyslexia is a test called DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills), typically given to all students in kindergarten through third grade to assess their overall reading and literacy, said Patrick Kennedy, a senior research associate at the University of Oregon’s Center on Teaching & Learning. The test was not designed to detect dyslexia but is used “in the dearth of other tools,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy and his colleagues planned to have 4,800 U.S. students in kindergarten through third grade take the DIBELS assessment.

The researchers hope to evaluate if DIBELS successfully identifies dyslexia and how it can be used most effectively.