Non-participatory user-centered design of accessible teacher-teleoperated robot and tablets for minimally verbal autistic children

Autistic children with limited language ability are an important but overlooked community. We develop a teacher-teleoperated robot and tablet system, as well as learning activities, to help teach facial emotions to minimally verbal autistic children. We then conduct user studies with 31 UK and Serbia minimally verbal autistic children to evaluate the system's accessibility. Results showed minimally verbal autistic children could use the tablet interface to control or respond to a humanoid robot and could understand the face learning activities. We found that a flexible and powerful wizard-of-oz tablet interface respected the needs of the children and their teachers. Our work suggests that a non-participatory, user-centered design process can create a robot and tablet system that is accessible to many autistic children.