Popular Science has written a great article on robots and autism featuring Keepon:

Two years ago, a yellow spongiform robot named Keepon became a minor YouTube sensation when one of its creators programmed it to do a squishy, twisty dance in time to the Spoon song “I Turn My Camera On.” The video has garnered more than 2 million hits. Now Keepon’s keepers, Marek Michalowski, a Ph.D student in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and Hideki Kozima of Miyagi University in Japan, are turning Keepon’s attention to a more serious task: to study how children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) interact socially and to see if the robot may be able to help in therapy.

Keepon is just one of the many new robots that researchers are using to study and to help children with ASD. The robots do everything from studying the children’s social interactions and their emotional states to drawing them out socially.

Children with ASD often have trouble with the “dance” of body language and facial gestures needed to have successful conversations and social contact with others. Both reading the intentions of others and knowing their own emotions can be a struggle, and children often become stranded both emotionally and socially.

One baby in every 150 born today in the U.S. is diagnosed with ASD. Treatment involves a combination of therapies — behavioral, educational, physical, occupational, and speech — that is costly and not always effective. After finding that children with ASD interact more easily with robots than with people, researchers began developing expressive and interactive robots that can assist them in studying and creating effective therapy for the children.

Keepon’s gentle boogieing and its simple, innocuous appearance (five inches tall, rubbery, resembling two tennis balls stacked one on top of the other) make it perfect for interacting with socially withdrawn children. Armless and legless and only possessing two eyes and a nose, Keepon expresses itself mainly through its four movements: nodding, turning, rocking and bobbing.

However, Keepon does have a camera behind those eyes and a microphone hidden in its nose. Researchers Michalowski and Kozima have studied preschool children with ASD in Japan and have found that interacting with the robots draws the children into a range of new social behaviors. Videos of those encounters show the children feeding Keepon imaginary food, giving it imaginary medicine when it has a Band-Aid on its head, and protecting it against abuse by other children.

The most striking video shows one girl slowly forging a relationship with the robot. At first she refuses to even directly look at Keepon, but as the days go on, she draws closer to the robot, eventually touching it with a xylophone stick, then her hand. After weeks, she can be seen looking into Keepon’s eyes, putting a hat on it, and even giving it a kiss, an action she rarely performed even towards her own mother.

Read more…

P.S. Keepon will be on the Today Show next week, April 15th at 8am. More details soon!