Proposal of Serious Games for a Socially Assistive Robot Based on Eye Contact and Visual Attention of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Eye contact is one of the main human skills, and a prerequisite of verbal language. However, children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often have an important deficit in this skill, compromising their entire cognitive and social development. This work shows the development of two Serious Games (SGs), based on the concept of Child-Robot Interaction (CRI), for the exercise and improvement of eye contact and visual attention, as well as concepts such as imitation and emotion recognition. For face detection and eye movement monitoring, an open source development framework of machine learning named MediaPipe was used. Tests with children with ASD will be conducted, and it is expected these SGs have a positive impact regarding the improvement of both eye contact and visual attention for these children.