A Tablet-Based Lexicon Application for Robot-Aided Educational Interaction of Children with Dyslexia

Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder that has the highest prevalence among different types of learning disorders. Dyslexic children usually have difficulty in reading and as a result, they face different educational problems at school. Currently, social robots are widely used as educational assistants and tutors, mainly for children with special needs. The Taban robot is a modern educational social robot, which was developed specifically for dyslexic children. In this paper, an android application was designed and developed to facilitate child-robot interaction just by means of a tablet. Using this smart tablet game, the children could collaborate with the Taban social robot in solving the pedagogic problems and practicing educational concepts, while the robot provides them not only beneficial verbal and physical reactions by its hands, but also effective visual feedback on its touch screen. For the first step in this research, the acceptability of the designed tablet game was investigated for twenty-one participants that fifth of them had dyslexia. The hopeful results of the SAM questionnaires filled out by the children, demonstrate high acceptability of the tablet game. Furthermore, by implementing automatic assessment based on the designed standard criteria, the platform could meaningfully distinguish the two groups of children (dyslexic and typically developed (TD)) according to their achieved scores in the game. Thus, the high potential value of the designed robot-aided tablet game was illustrated to be used as an assistive tool for dyslexic children.