Make-believe play is an important part of the developmental process for children. It helps them build social skills, express feelings, and enhance vocabulary. For many children with autism, identifying when they are engaging in make-believe play may be harder to pinpoint than it is in typically developing children. Their imagination is working, however, expressing it in a way other people can understand or relate to may be more challenging.

The dynamic can make it difficult for parents of children with autism to understand what their child is thinking and how they are feeling in the moment.

Tickle College of Engineering Assistant Professors Samuel Olatunji (ISE) and Rachael Bevill Burns (EECS) are collaborating on a National Science Foundation-funded project that may help facilitate better make-believe play for children with autism. The project examines whether carefully designed social tabletop robots can help make children’s imaginative play more visible to their families.

Rather than replacing human relationships, the robots are intended to support parent-child interaction by providing children with a predictable and engaging play partner. The therapy tool may help parents notice themes, emotions, and intentions expressed during play.

“Parents want to understand how their child is feeling, and understand what’s going on in their child’s mind, and if the child can’t tell them then the parents might not know,” said Burns. “They might think that maybe the child’s not thinking about these things or not playing in the way they are expecting.”

Addressing a growing need

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disability characterized by difficulties with social interaction or communication and the presence of restricted interests or repetitive behaviors.

According to the latest report from the Center of Disease Control’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Network, about 1 in 31 (3.2%) of children aged 8 years has been identified with autism spectrum disorder, an increase from 1 in 150 in 2000.

“This is a need that is becoming more challenging these days, because a lot of parents of children with autism are stressed,” said Olatunji. “Caregivers are not sure how to manage that caregiver burden, so if we have a tool that can help ease that burden, facilitate the conversation, get interactions easier to manage, we should leverage those tools.”

Burns and Olatunji are collaborating with Guy Laban, a senior lecturer in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. As part of an NSF US-Israel Binational Science Foundation grant, Burns and Olatunji received $800,000 in funding for the project and Laban received $532,000.

The research has three parts:

• The first part is meeting with autism specialists, parents, and families of typically developing children to identify robot behaviors and play supports that encourage make-believe play while remaining understandable to parents.
• The second part is controlled laboratory studies that will compare robot-mediated and non-robot make-believe play to determine how robot predictability, prompting style, and parent involvement affect children’s play behaviors and parents’ understanding of those behaviors.
• The third part is deploying the robot into homes for a six-to-eight-week period with families in the United States and Israel to examine how repeated use may change parents’ perceptions, family interactions, and uncover potential positive outcomes that could be implemented without the robot.

“We first want to understand directly from the families and the autism specialists what their challenges have been and how they have been communicating and interacting, because they’ve probably been doing this in their own way,” Olatunji said. “We want to see how the robot could make that better, and then we would go into our own labs to design the robot to meet that need.”

A facilitating tool for families

Olatunji and Burns are hoping the project can strengthen parent/caregiver-child connections, help inform the development of better tools for home use, and expand knowledge of how technology can support communication and mutual understanding in neurodiverse families.

By developing a robot to serve as a facilitator that helps guide a child with autism to talk about what they are doing, Olatunji and Burns believe make-believe play can become an enriching experience for everyone in a household.

“It’s almost like training wheels for how to play with other kids,” Burns said. “And it’s also for the parent to better understand how their child is thinking about these things and get excited. Because when the parent is excited, they will want to get more and more involved.”

Contact

Rhiannon Potkey ([email protected])