A theurapetic robot designed to help children with autism learn how to interact with the world, and its people :
Fortunately for the toy industry, and considering it has no arms or legs, Keepon turns out to be one hell of a dancer :
Some background from BusinessWeek :
Keepon’s story begins about seven years ago with Hideki Kozima, a Japanese expert in artificial intelligence and robotics at the School of Project Design at Miyagi University. Kozima theorized that an emotive robot could help autistic children, who can be overwhelmed in face-to-face interactions, by reducing the complexities of communication to a few simple gestures. A child pats the robot on the head. It responds with a playful bob. The child talks to the robot. It turns to face him and nods.To test his idea, Kozima created Keepon, a fuzzy, mouthless robot packed with $30,000 worth of machinery, sensors, and computer chips. (The name is a portmanteau of the Japanese word for yellow, kiiroi, and the onomatopoeia pon for bounce.) In clinical use, a researcher in an observation room controls Keepon wirelessly, dictating its interactions with children. While testing the gizmo in day-care centers, Kozima found that autistic children made more eye contact with the robot than they did with people. Behaviors they rarely expressed toward humans, like touching and nurturing, became more commonplace. Since then dozens of research centers and universities have bought the pricey bot for therapeutic work. “Using a robot can be a real ice breaker for children and clinicians,” says Anjana N. Bhat, a researcher at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education, who is conducting clinical trials with robots and autistic children.
Kids these days, they get dancing robots. What did we get? Pet Rocks.
