Pediatrics seminars

Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a prevalent and disabling condition that affects larger numbers of children and adolescents worldwide. Until recently, we have understood little about the nature of PTSD reactions in our youngest children (aged under 8 years old). This talk describes our work over the last 15 years working with this very young age group. It overviews how we need a markedly different PTSD diagnosis for very young children, data on the prevalence of this new diagnostic algorithm, and the development of a psychological intervention and its evaluation in a clinical trial.

Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) have shown great potential to help children in therapeutic and healthcare contexts. SARs have been used for companionship, learning enhancement, social and communication skills rehabilitation for children with special needs (e.g., autism), and mood improvement. Robots can be used as novel tools to assess and rehabilitate children’s communication skills and mental well-being by providing affordable and accessible therapeutic and mental health services. In this talk, I will present the various studies I have conducted during my PhD and at the Cambridge Affective Intelligence and Robotics Lab to explore how robots can help assess and rehabilitate children’s communication skills and mental well-being. More specifically, I will provide both quantitative and qualitative results and findings from (i) an exploratory study with children with autism and global developmental disorders to investigate the use of intelligent personal assistants in therapy; (ii) an empirical study involving children with and without language disorders interacting with a physical robot, a virtual agent, and a human counterpart to assess their linguistic skills; (iii) an 8-week longitudinal study involving children with autism and language disorders who interacted either with a physical or a virtual robot to rehabilitate their linguistic skills; and (iv) an empirical study to aid the assessment of mental well-being in children. These findings can inform and help the child-robot interaction community design and develop new adaptive robots to help assess and rehabilitate linguistic skills and mental well-being in children.

Results: the main areas which were modified based on participatory feedback were the variety of immersive scenarios to cover a range of ages and interests, the number of levels of complexity to ensure small improvements were measured, the feedback and reward schemes to ensure positive reinforcement, and specific provision for participants with balance issues, who had difficulties when using head-mounted displays. The effectiveness of the finalised BEARS suite will be evaluated in a large-scale clinical trial. We have added in additional login options for other members of the family and based on patient feedback we have improved the accompanying reward schemes. Conclusions: Through participatory design we have developed a training package (BEARS) for young people with bilateral cochlear implants. The training games are appropriate for use by the study population and ultimately should lead to patients taking control of their own management and reducing the reliance upon outpatient-based rehabilitation programmes. Virtual reality training provides a more relevant and engaging approach to rehabilitation for young people.