A Hands-Off Assistive Robotic Educational Intervention Strategy for Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Jenny Chang Ho Interaction Laboratory University of Southern California 941 West 37th Place, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0781 1 (626) 458-3868 [email protected] ABSTRACT This paper describes a feasibility study of using an autonomous and socially assistive mobile robot to aid children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder by providing encouragement, monitoring, and increasing the children’s attention and academic productivity. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.4.2 [Computers and Society]: social issues; J.4 [Social and Behavioral Sciences]: psychology; I.2.9 [Artificial Intelligence]: robotics General Terms Human Factors, Experimentation Keywords Human-robot interaction, embodiment, social robots, psychology, educational intervention strategy, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder 1. INTRODUCTION Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a condition that that affects 3% to 5% of school-age children or approximately 2 million children in the United States [7, 8]. It is estimated that at least one child will have ADHD in a class size of 25 to 30 students [8]. These ADHD children are faced with negative behaviors that include low self esteem, social and academic failure, substance abuse, and a possible increase in the risk of antisocial and criminal behavior [2]. Early intervention will reduce these risks and provide long-term effects to improve the children’s lives. A combination treatment of medical, educational, behavioral and psychological intervention strategy has been shown to be the most effective in treating children with ADHD [2, 8]. If an educational, behavioral and psychological intervention strategy would prove effective, prescription doses would be less necessary [8]. This in term can reduce the undesirable side effects of medication. This work aims to develop a socially assistive mobile robot to provide an effective educational intervention strategy for elementary school students with ADHD. It also aims to assist teachers in helping the students with ADHD. Teaching ADHD children requires special training and individualized attention from the teachers. However, due to the shortage of special education teachers and ADHD students being placed in the same classrooms with average students, regular teachers’ attentions make up for less than what an ADHD student needs. The human-robot interaction is not only going to provide one-on-one attention needed by the student with ADHD, but also monitor the student’s progress and increase his or her attention and academic productivity. Overall, this work aims to use hands-off assistive robotic by implementing the mobile robot, Eddie, to accomplish the following goals: provide an educational intervention strategy through human-robot interaction, provide one-on-one attention needed by a student with ADHD, monitor the student’s progress in the absence of a teacher, and determine the effectiveness of the proposed educational intervention strategy in terms of improving the student’s scores. 2. RELATED WORK Beyond the traditional methodologies, many software-based systems for diagnosing and coping with ADHD exist which include Rizzo et al.’s virtual reality system, the virtual classroom [13]. The virtual classroom is used as a tool for diagnosing attention disorder. It is visible through a head-mounted display that blocks everything in the outside world and several distractions are introduce in the virtual environment to test attention. The system also tracks the head, arm, and leg movements using three position-and-orientation magnetic trackers from Ascension Technology. Rizzo et al. also want to create a virtual environment conducive for the ADHD student’s learning. In contrast, this requires modification of the environment and physical interaction. It may also cause both eye strain and motion sickness, which are typical problems of viewing animated three dimensional video images [14]. In contrast, a hands-off assistive human robot approach is a better alternative as it provides a safe way of interacting with the ADHD child through social, rather than physical, interaction. The goal with this work is to change a child's behavior or improve his or her behavior through socialization. This can be done by enabling the child initiate contact with the robot and vice versa. It also promotes social awareness as the student is not immersed in his or her own world as in the virtual environment. This is accomplished by enabling the student to interact with other people, such as the teacher, while interacting with the robot. An advantage of using a robot is embodiment. Embodiment of the assistive robot, Eddie, enables a robot to move and engage the child more effectively than for example having the child look through a video game on the computer, which is essentially what Rizzo et al.'s approach can be seen as.Many socially interactive robots are developed to serve children as educational tools [6]. They are used for children with mental illness such as autism. Michaud and Caron implemented a mobile robotic toy Roball to not only entertain children but also help children with autism [5]. Assisting autistic children with robotic toys and experiencing success are not uncommon in these applications [10, 11, 12]. Robotics applications for children with ADHD currently do not largely exist, if they exist at all. However, a feasibility study is conducted in this research to help determine whether a socially interactive robot can be tailored for children with ADHD and serve as an educational intervention strategy to help them make progress in academics. 3. SYSTEM DESIGN The robot system, Eddie, consists of an ActivMedia Pioneer 2-DX mobile robot with a SICK LMS200 scanning laser range finder, a Sony pan-tilt-zoom camera, and a primary battery power. The laser range finder enables the robot to locate the student wearing a reflective fiducial on his or her