Meet Milo, the Humanoid Robot That Helps Children with Autism

There is a Robotic company called RoboKind which has designed a humanoid robot exclusively for children suffering from Autism Spectrum Disorders. Dubbed as Milo, when it speaks, icons are displayed on the LCD touchscreen where children can learn his sayings.

A robot like Milo has the potential to deliver and teach again and again; which helps the Autism children to learn in a better way. There is a touchscreen in Milo’s interface that can display visual icons. Therefore,when it starts talking, icons for core vocabulary are synchronized with his spoken words.

Milo can teach social skills in a social narrative format, where he basically describes what a target skill should look like. For example- “when someone greets a person, he/she should look at the other person’s face, smile, and say hello.” Social narratives are proven, evidence-based practices that work with kids suffering from autism, but the company has also managed to provide visual support and have the icons appear on the robot’s chest screen that read “look, smile, and say hi.”As a human, that’s pretty hard to replicate.

After that Milo tells, “Let’s watch some friends looking, smiling, and saying hi,” and then on the iPad the child is using to the interface, there are 3-5 video models with actors demonstrating the target skills.

Once the demonstration is over, the kids are shown test videos and Milo asks them questions based on the video. The analysis is done by the robot in the cloud.