About EMBOA project
EMBOA project entitled “Affective loop in Socially Assistive Robotics as an intervention tool for children with autism” is a research and didactic project that aims at enhancement of social robot intervention in children with autism with affective computing technologies. The project is implemented in years 2019-2022 under EU Erasmus Plus Strategic Partnership for Higher Education Programme.
Rationale behind the project
- Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) suffer from multiple deficits, and limited social and emotional skills are among those.
- There are promising results in the use of robots in supporting the social and emotional development of children with autism.
- Children with autism are eager to interact with human-like looking robots.
- Social robots proved to be a way to get through the social obstacles of a child and make him/her involved in the interaction.
- In the project, we combine social robots, that are already used in therapy for children with autism with algorithms for automatic emotion recognition.
Main tasks
- Identify state-of-the-art of emotion recognition applied in human-robot interaction in austism intervention, based on systematic literature review;
- Performing feasibility study confirming the possibility of the application;
- Identification of the best practices and obstacles in using the combination of the technologies;
- Development of guidelines and practical evaluation of applying emotion recognition technologies in robot-supported intervention in children with autism;
- The guidelines will be shared in English, Polish, German, Turkish and Macedonian.
What we hope to obtain is a novel approach for creating an affective loop in child-robot interaction that would enhance interventions regarding emotional intelligence building in children with autism.
Partners of the consortium
- Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland (coordinator)
- University of Hertfordshire, UK
- Istanbul Teknik Universitesi, Turkey
- Yeditepe University Vakif, Turkey
- Macedonian Associaton for Applied Psychology, North Macedonia
- University of Augsburg, Germany
Latest News From Our Project
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Multiplier Event in Augsburg
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2nd round of observation in Istanbul
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Multiplier Event in Istanbul
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Observations in Gdansk
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Multiplier Event in Gdańsk
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Training “Affective computing and social robots in the therapy of children with autism”
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Project meeting at Yeditepe University in Istanbul.
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Presentation at the 30th IEEE Signal Processing and Communications Applications Conference (SİU)
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Information about the EMBOA project at Kadir Has University in Istanbul.
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“Evaluating the Impact of Voice Activity Detection on Speech Emotion Recognition for Autistic Children”