roboblog

Popchilla’s World Kickstarter

Seema — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 20:41:09 +0000

Interbots is excited to announce our new iPad game, Popchilla’s World! Popchilla’s World is designed to help children with autism practice daily routines and social interaction skills in a fun and playful way.

In the game, Popchilla needs the child’s help to navigate the world and complete simple activities like brushing Popchilla’s teeth, making Popchilla’s bed, or saying hello. As the child completes these activities they are rewarded with in-game achievements and new activities to explore.

A special “Grownups View” allows parents, therapists and other caregivers to track the child’s progress, personalize the activities and get recommendations for new activities to try. In the future, caregivers will be able to make their own activities and share them with other parents, therapists, and families.

We’re running a Kickstarter Campaign throughout April, National Autism Awareness Month, to raise the funding needed to expand our prototype of Popchilla’s World into a complete game. We’d appreciate some help getting the word out about our campaign – if you know of anyone affected by autism, feel free to share the link with them.

If you’re interested in being a beta tester for Popchilla’s World you can sign up here.

Touch & Say Now Available for iPhone

Seema — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:38:10 +0000

Touch & Say, the iPad app we developed to help young children and children with Autism Spectrum Disorders practice basic socialization skills, is now available for the iPhone! You can download it for free in the iTunes store. We also made a couple of minor updates to the iPad version and encourage everyone who has it to upgrade (for free!) to the latest edition.

We’re also beginning work on a new app for children with ASD. Stay tuned to find out more!

iPhone app – BeSeen

Seema — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 19:16:06 +0000

Interbots is excited to announce the launch of BeSeen, an iPhone app that we helped to develop for Carnegie Mellon University’s Information Networking Institute and Web Wise Kids. BeSeen is a single-player game set in the simulated social network of a fictional high school. By posting status messages, commenting on their friends’ statuses and solving puzzles, the player wins awards and makes new friends. Ultimately the goal is to teach children ages 11-14 responsible online behavior including securing their personal information, posting appropriate content and treating others courteously.

Gamasutra recently published a nice overview of the project.

BeSeen is available for free download in the iTunes Store. An Android version will be available in December. Check it out!

iPad app – Touch & Say

Seema — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 18:17:26 +0000

We’ve released a new iPad app! It’s called Touch & Say and is designed for young children aged 1-4 as well as children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) who may have developmentally delayed social skills.

The app provides six activities that allow children to practice the following social skills:
* Verbalization
* Emotion recognition
* Color recognition
* Following directives
* Directed gaze (a key step in developing joint attention)

These activities are based on the exercises developed for our pilot study with the Autism Center of Pittsburgh. While the pilot study centered around our Popchilla robot, this app is designed for standalone use – no robot required! It’s free to download in the iTunes store – get it today!

Update on Popchilla for Autism Therapy

Seema — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 13:01:18 +0000

As you may remember from our earlier post, last fall we received a MicroSpark grant to explore using Popchilla as an autism therapy tool. The resulting pilot program involved a dozen Pittsburgh area families and two local Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) organizations – the Autism Center of Pittsburgh and Community Alternatives.

As part of the project, we created an iPad app designed to let therapists and parents guide Popchilla through a variety of activities that help children practice their social referencing skills. The activities were determined based on suggestions from our therapists and feedback from participants’ parents, and focused on recognizing emotions, responding to directives, social play and verbalization. You can see a video of this prototype iPad app below:

This pilot program ran from September to December of 2010. Although this was a very short program, the response from the participating families was very positive. We’re currently working on raising some money to fund additional studies and a small run of Popchillas. Our plan is to bundle these robots with a commercial version of the iPad app, and make them available to the home therapy market.

We’re also putting the finishing touches on an iPad app for children with ASD that contains a simple version of the activities used in the pilot program – no robot required. We’ll be sure to let you know when it is available in the app store.

If you have a child with an Autism Spectrum Disorder, we would like to know how you use technology to address your child’s needs. Please consider filling out our autism technology survey. If you know someone else who has a child with ASD, please feel free to forward the survey along to them.