The “FeelGood!” project has a mission to enhance the healthcare experience of autistic individuals. Through the development of interventions utilizing social robots, virtual reality, and serious games, the project aims to improve patients’ body awareness, functional communication abilities, and coping strategies for handling stressful medical situations. The project acknowledges the difficulties that autistic individuals face in accessing appropriate healthcare, and seeks to create tailored interventions that can effectively address these challenges
The session’s planning is founded on a need for personalization and adaptation of intervention based on the patient’s needs and peculiarities, incorporating different VM strategies, mainly peer and prompting modelling, and addressing specific situations and social contexts. In order to achieve a high level of customization, it is important to take a multidisciplinary approach that involves all stakeholders. Therefore, the team will consist of therapists, practitioners, health professionals, and specialists in human-robot interaction. Additionally, the intervention will be co-designed with a group of potential users, who are identified as autistic individuals of different ages and levels of support.
This research will include longitudinal studies to evaluate the intervention’s effectiveness and refine the social robot’s behaviour according to the therapeutic stage.
This project is supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR)
under grant number 20227BCP93, PRIN 2022, “FEELGOOD! Social robot-mediated video modeling intervention to facilitate communication between healthcare professional and patient with autism spectrum disorder “.
Project partners: Department of Biotechnological and Applied Clinical Sciences, University of L’Aquila, Computer Science Dept., University of Bari Aldo Moro, omputer Science Dept., Univeristy of Turin
