THE APRIL PROJECT - AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER (ASD) ROBO-THERAPY SOFTWARE

Abstract

The APRIL project provides a digital infrastructure designed to help centers that support children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) through the use of social robots. The project consists of three main components: an online website, an offline web-application, and robots (NAO and Furhat). Legacy systems were re-engineered using Svelte, FastAPI and databases (MongoDB for the online website, and DictDataBase library for the offline application). Robots compatibility issue was solved by integrating a deprecated naoqi library for NAO written onPython 2.7. Our team implemented a unified control interface for NAO and FURHAT, with the database system for children and therapy session data. Online website, a platform that allows parents to view summary information about the progress of their children, was implemented. The aim of this project is to create software that allows specialists to control robots for therapy sessions and evaluate sessions using the offline application, while providing parents with data about their children’s progress through the online website with an intuitive UI.