Live From CES: Helping Kids With Autism

Probably no other robot displayed at CES has the potential for touching lives as deeply as Keepon, a robot that is designed to help children suffering from autism. The Keepon robot is a friendly fellow, capable of bobbing around and scrunching itself up and down. Its bright yellow body sports a face composed of two friendly eyes, and a nose that conceals a camera. Keepon has been used in autism therapy in Japan since 2003. Controlled by a therapist watching through the nose camera, the robot interacts with an autistic child, helping him or her develop fundamental social elements such as learning to pay attention to other peoples' faces, and how to navigate the rules of joint attention -- i.e. when someone we're talking with turns their head to look at something, we generally take that as a cue to follow their gaze and look at whatever they are looking at. The researcher I spoke to said that some parents had been moved to tears as they watched a child who had such severe autism that they didn't produce language learn to interact with the robot socially to the point where the child kissed the Keepon. Keepon can also be operated automatically, where it performs basic functions such as tracking faces, and the robot is also used with non-austistic children as a tool in social development research. Keepon is now being commercialized through BeatBots and is currently targeted towards the researcher market.