Promoting adaptive and social communication skills in young adults with autism spectrum disorder using programmable toy robots with social story, a pilot study.

Researchers tested whether toy robots could help teach life skills to teenagers with autism. Four teenagers learned how to make purchases by watching a programmable Lego robot act out the steps while telling a social story. All participants successfully learned the skill, meeting at least 80% of target behaviors. This suggests that combining robots with social stories might be an effective way to teach important daily living skills to young people with autism.

This pilot study investigated using programmable toy robots (Lego Boost) combined with social stories to teach community living skills to adolescents with severe autism spectrum disorder. Four participants from an Italian public health service were taught purchasing skills through robot modeling. Using a multiple A-B-A baseline design across subjects, researchers measured adaptive and social communication behaviors during purchase activities. All participants achieved target criteria of 80% total behaviors and 100% social communication behaviors.

The study suggests that robot-assisted intervention can effectively combine social stories with modeling approaches to improve adaptive and social communication skills in adolescents with autism.

Robot-assisted intervention combining social stories with modeling may be a promising approach for teaching adaptive and social communication skills. However, larger studies with control groups are needed to establish effectiveness before widespread clinical implementation.

This is a pilot study with only four participants from a single location. The study design details are not fully specified in the abstract. No comparison group was included, and generalization to other skills or populations is unclear.

In the last decade, the advances in technology have included robotics as an intervention tool to promote adaptive and social communication skills in subjects with Autism spectrum disorder. The goal of this study is to promote community living skills in adolescents with ASD, using a Programmable toy robot as a model and narrative agent of a social story related to the target activity. The study was conducted in an Italian public Social Health Service for adolescents with Neurodevelopmental disorder and included four adolescents with severe Autism spectrum disorder. The experiment concerned the application of the Lego Boots programmable toy robot as a model used for the interpretation of a social story related to the execution of a life activity in the community (making a purchase).

A multiple A-B-A baseline experimental design across subjects was used. All participants reached the target criteria: at least 80% of the total behaviors and 100% of social communication behaviors of the purchase activity identified through the task analysis procedure. Our results have confirmed the effectiveness of programmable toy robots modeling for teaching community living skills to adolescents with autism. They support the idea that robot-assisted intervention can combine social story with the modeling standard treatment to improve adaptive and social communication skills.