A robotic assistant to support the development of communication skills of children with disabilities

Currently, the robotic assistants, as well as the intelligent ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) tools, play an important role in different stages of evaluation, therapy, or education of People With Communication Disorders (PWCD). However, not all of these tools can easily incorporate new functionalities, exercises, or activities for therapy sessions. Likewise, in developing countries, a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) is in charge to perform several activities related with design and planning of therapies, patient's monitoring, counseling services, among many others. On those grounds, in this paper we present a robotic assistant that has multiple costumes, is able to provide support during therapy, can manage the information, among others functionalities. This robotic assistant is a part of a complete intelligent-system for supporting the Speech-Language Therapy (SLT) process from a viewpoint of domain knowledge modelling. With the aim of analyzing the feasibility of our approach, we have carried out two tests, one to determine the robot's response on controlled environments, and another to analyze the children's response to the robot.