Tao Zhang Undergraduate Dissertation 2017/18

Designing a game scenario via ZENO to encourage children with Autism to recognize and label emotions

Supervised by R.K.Moore

Abstract

This dissertation project presents an experimental study where autistic children interact with social humanoid robot ZENO. ZENO is a human-shape and child-friendly robot which is capable of displaying expressive facial emotions and simple gestures. This project investigates whether or not the game scenario (play session) delivered by the humanoid robot ZENO could help children with Autism Spectrum Disorders to recognize and label emotions. The entire experiment is composed by three small experiments/sessions with 12 participants, and took three different measurements for "before" and "after" comparison. The game scenario (play session) is the variable which contributed to the final results, other noise was minimized. The outcomes show that the game scenario (play session) is the key to the success of the goal established. Eventually, the project indicated the encouraging findings, and highlighted the future works concerning sample data collection and various design of the game scenario.