Co-design of scenarios for interacting with a NAO robot in
                         treating autism spectrum condition
                         N. Alberto Borghese1,* , Francesca Ciardo2 , Eleonora Chitti1 , Raffaele Scuotto2 ,
                         Rossana Actis-Grosso2 , Filippo Cavallo3 , Laura Fiorini3 , Lorenzo Pugi3 , Benedetta Olivari4 ,
                         Maria Antonia Tedoldi5 , Cecilia Carenzi5 and Paola Ricciardelli2
                         1
                           Applied Intelligent Systems Laboratory (AIS-Lab), Department of Computer Science, University of Milan, Milano, Italy
                         2
                           Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
                         3
                           Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Florence, Florence, Italy
                         4
                           Istituto Dosso Verde, Viale Corsica 82, Milan, Italy
                         5
                           Fondazione Sacra Famiglia Onlus, Cesano Boscone, Italy


                                      Abstract
                                      Training socio-cognitive skills of children with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) is exploring with great interest
                                      social robots. In fact, research results show that these robots are well received by children and this opens the
                                      possibility to be adopted effectively in treating ASC. Here we show the co-design process followed to design and
                                      develop an innovative digital platform that enables interactive activities between a child with ASC and a NAO
                                      robot. Main characteristic of this process is strong collaboration and a progressive refinement of both technical
                                      and functional requirements to take into account both clinical needs and technological possibilities, with the aim
                                      of producing a platform that can show, on one side, a robust behavior and, on the other side, provide tasks that
                                      are useful and relevant for the clinics.

                                      Keywords
                                      Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Autism Spectrum Conditions, Smart Objects, Interactive Co-design, Emotional
                                      Intelligence




                         Acknowledgments
                         This work was partially supported by Grant Number G53D23002860006, project AIRCA, PRIN 2022:
                         https://airca.di.unimi.it/




                          Italian Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Human Machine Interaction (AIxHMI 2024), November 26, 2024, Bolzano, Italy
                         *
                           Corresponding author.
                          $ alberto.borghese@unimi.it (N. A. Borghese); francesca.ciardo@unimib.it (F. Ciardo); eleonora.chitti@unimi.it (E. Chitti);
                          raffaele.scuotto@unimib.it (R. Scuotto); rossana.actis@unimib.it (R. Actis-Grosso); filippo.cavallo@unifi.it (F. Cavallo);
                          laura.fiorini@unifi.it (L. Fiorini); lorenzo.pugi@unifi.it (L. Pugi); olivari.dossoverdemi@ismc.it (B. Olivari);
                          mtedoldi@sacrafamiglia.it (M. A. Tedoldi); ccarenzi@sacrafamiglia.it (C. Carenzi); paola.ricciardelli@unimib.it
                          (P. Ricciardelli)
                                     © 2024 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).


CEUR
                  ceur-ws.org
Workshop      ISSN 1613-0073
Proceedings