Co-Designing and Field-Testing Adaptable Robots for Triggering Positive Social Interactions for Adolescents with Cerebral Palsy

Robots in the health care sector are often envisioned as a kind of social interaction partner. We suggest a different approach, where robots become adaptable tools for facilitating positive social interaction between and learning for special needs users. The paper presents the development and a series of field tests of a new robot game platform, which is envisioned to level the playing field for users with distinct motor and cognitive capacities by adapting the robots to their abilities. The series of field tests shows that the system is successful in triggering positive social interactions between the players.