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Design and Implementation of an Emotion Recognition and Expression System and Evaluation of Social Robots’ Effectiveness in Speech Therapy Interventions

Esfandbod, Alireza | 2023

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  1. Type of Document: Ph.D. Dissertation
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 55754 (08)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Mechanical Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Meghdari, Ali; Taheri, Alireza; Alemi, Minoo
  7. Abstract:
  8. Employing social robots in interactions with children for educational and healthcare objectives could enhance the efficiency of interventions and boost the children’s cognitive and affective outcomes by increasing engagement and providing motivation. This dissertation investigates three main subtopics to determine the efficacy of utilizing social robots in speech therapy sessions in interactions with children suffering from speech and language disorders. We hypothesize that interacting with social robots acting as therapists’ assistants in speech therapy interventions contributes to the formation of language-based communications and improves the individuals’ language skills. The first research subtopic investigates the potential of a robotic platform capable of lip-syncing, acting as the speech therapist’s assistant. The results from the study’s questionnaire acceptance items indicate, with a 95% confidence interval, that the acceptance of the socially assistive robot among adults and children is higher than other educational tools, such as lip-reading videos. The second research subtopic studies the utility of a social robot capable of performing affective interactions and lip-syncing in interaction with children suffering from language disorders. The outcomes of this investigation shed light on the constructive impact of children-robot interactions on different aspects of children’s language skills and the significant enhancement of participants’ overall language abilities (p = 0.000). The third and final subtopic investigates the prospects of employing social robots to teach vocabulary via the fast-mapping technique. The results of this experiment demonstrate that robot-assisted sessions are more effective than conventional ones, and utilizing social robots leads to significant improvement in children’s cognitive (p = 0.037<0.05) and emotional performance (p = 0.045<0.05). We hope that the results of this study will enhance the efficacy of therapy sessions and decrease the costs of educational/therapeutic interventions.
  9. Keywords:
  10. Social Robotics ; Lipreading ; Facial Expression Recognition ; Emotion Recognition ; Human Robot Interaction (HRI) ; Speech Therapy ; Language Disorders ; Speech Disorders ; Affective Human-Robot Interaction

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