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Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) have demonstrated success in the delivery of interventions to individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). To date, these robot-mediated interventions have primarily been designed and implemented by robotics researchers. It remains unclear whether therapists could independently utilize robots to deliver therapies in clinical settings. In this paper, we conducted a study to investigate whether therapists could design and implement robot-mediated interventions for children with ASD. Furthermore, we compared therapists’ performance, efficiency, and perceptions towards using a Virtual Reality (VR) and kinesthetic-based interface for delivering robot-mediated interventions. Overall, our results demonstrated therapists could independently design and implement interventions with a SAR. They were faster at designing a new intervention using VR than a kinesthetic interface. Therapists also had similar performance to delivering in-person interventions when utilizing VR to deliver interventions with the robot. Therapists reported moderate workload using the VR interface and perceived VR to be usable. 

Socially assistive robots (SARs) are being utilized for delivering a variety of healthcare services to patients. The design of these human-robot interactions (HRIs) for healthcare applications have primarily focused on the interaction flow and verbal behaviors of a SAR. To date, there has been minimal focus on investigating how SAR nonverbal behaviors should be designed according to the context of the SAR’s communication goals during a HRI. In this paper, we present a methodology to investigate nonverbal behavior during specific human-human healthcare interactions so that they can be applied to a SAR. We apply this methodology to study the context-dependent vocal nonverbal behaviors of therapists during discrete trial training (DTT) therapies delivered to children with autism. We chose DTT because it is a therapy commonly being delivered by SARs and modeled after human-human interactions. Results from our study led to the following recommendations for the design of the vocal nonverbal behavior of SARs during a DTT therapy: 1) the consequential error correction should have a lower pitch and intensity than the discriminative stimulus but maintain a similar speaking rate; and 2) the consequential reinforcement should have a higher pitch and intensity than the discriminative stimulus but a slower speaking rate.