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