Submitted Abstract
Autism affects one percent of the population and its associated costs are important for the families and society. Additionally, the medical and educational services that are currently provided are often insufficient or inadequate. Because of children with autism’s heterogeneity and specificities, such as a need for repetition and predictable environments, practitioners’ work can be tiring, frustrating, and often stressful. Thus, the need of adequate support and efficient tools constitutes a real challenge for practitioners, policy-makers, and researchers.Since the last decade, there has been an increase of interest on robot-assisted therapy for autism. Robots are a promising tool both for the children with autism and the practitioners working with them. Robots are beneficial for children — they improve attention, social behavior, and imitation — and they can also be useful for practitioners. Robots can reduce work repetitiveness, provide personalized evidence-based interventions, and empower practitioners’ work by making interventions efficient, accessible, and less expensive for the families.However, while benefits for children with autism have been proved, very little is known regarding the impact, and possible reluctance, of practitioners to use robotic solutions. Therefore, there is the risk that expensive robotic solutions stay at research level and never be correctly implemented by practitioners.This project, I-PART, focuses on the factors underlying practitioners’ implementation of robots into their interventions for children with autism. It aims to a) understand practitioners’ needs and expectations regarding robotic solutions, b) to address these by improving the robotic interface and the company’s approach to the client, and c) to assess the impact of using a robot in practitioners’ final acceptance, performance, perceived self-efficiency, and well-being at work. By using a hands-on testing approach with practitioners, I-PART will improve the implementation of robotic solutions in autism and allow research to move from a research phase towards an implementation phase.