| Description |
Social robots are effective tools to make healthcare and education more accessible and affordable through standardization and mass replication.Today however working with robots requires extensive IT knowledge. Our vision is to bring social robots for healthcare and education from research centers to mass market by developing user-friendly robots which are accessible for everybody to script custom robot applications. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder. It costs £32 billion per year in the UK and greater than the cost of cancer, stroke and heart disease combined. The average lifetime saving of early and intensive behavioral intervention ranges from $1.6 to $2.8 million per child. This requires 20 to 40 hours of one-to-one therapy per week, costing $40,000 to 80,000 per year. The issue in USA is that while the healthcare systems pay for such therapies, there is a lack of therapists. In EU, the situation is worse as there is a tremendous lack of therapists, costs are not covered by health care systems and children receive insufficient number of hours or no therapy at all. We propose an open innovation to offer a holistic solution to make autism therapy accessible and affordable by providing a social robot platform to create, exchange, personalize, utilize and rate therapeutic robot applications by autism therapists and care providers with no IT background. An effective robotic platform for autism has to provide a large amount of various types of content and applications to meet the needs of different individuals. We make the creation of such platform and scaling it in Europe with its multi-cultrual and multi-lingual nature practical and economical through enabling user generated robot therapies to be adapted and re-used by others. This is where the economy of scale has to come from to build an app store of social robot therapies built by psychologists.
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