Digital Dictionary

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Rob’Autisme

Sophie Sakka

LS2N, Centrale Nantes, France

Rob’Autisme, or prosthesis in communication using the robot extension

The French Rob’Autisme project proposes a therapeutic support program initially intended for adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). It was initiated in 2014 and is the result of multidisciplinary collaborations. Its objective is the improvement of social skills and it is based on three mediations: robotics, culture and art. It consists of 20 1-ho weekly sessions, alternating 10 preparatory sessions and 10 robotic programming sessions, in which the six ASD participants are supported in the construction of a play whose actor is a robot. Then the work of the workshops is publicly presented during a session at the end of the program.

Rob’Autisme presents multiple originalities compared to approaches using the robot as a mediation tool, on the one hand, and to approaches for supporting autism in the broad sense, on the other hand. The project is based on the principle of resilience and considers behavioral disorders as the result of a context (consequence) and not as the starting point (cause) of the difficulty of social integration. It is then a question of defining, or redefining, the notion of the individual, that is, a person who is a member of a group and their legitimacy within said group.

There are two notions to be distinguished here: on the one hand, the way in which therapeutic support of cognitively disabled people is considered and, ...