The use of artificial intelligence for detecting the duration of autistic students' emotions in social interaction with the NAO robot: a case study

Within the field of education, technology is a fundamental element in responding to the diversity of students in the classroom. In this sense, robotics is the tool that can best help the demands of autistic students. Therefore, the aim of the research is to explore the application of robotics by analysing the emotions of autistic children to promote communication and social interaction. To this end, an automatic system based on neural networks has been designed to identify the emotions expressed by four autistic children throughout the process of interaction with the NAO robot where imitation, play and social interaction activities were developed. The results show that the emotions of sadness and anger are those expressed by the students throughout the activity for the greatest amount of time. Future lines of research include the possibility of designing other types of activities with the robot to analyse the influence they have on the children's moods.