Head Impact Severity Measures for Small Social Robots Thrown During Meltdown in Autism

Social robots have gained a lot of attention recently as it has been reported to be effective in supporting therapeutic efforts among children with autism. However, such children may exhibit a multitude of challenging behaviors that could be harmful to themselves and to others around them. Furthermore, social robots are meant as companion and to elicit behaviors, hence, the presence of a social robot during the occurrence of challenging behaviors might increase any potential harm. In this paper, we are quantifying the harm levels based on severity indices for one of the identified harmful scenarios that might emanate between a child and a social robot due to the manifestation of challenging behaviors. Our results revealed that the overall harm levels based on the selected severity indices are relatively low compared to their respective thresholds. However, our investigation of harm due to throwing of a small social robot to the head revealed that it could potentially cause tissue injuries, sub-concussive or even concussive events in extreme cases. The existence of such behaviors must be accounted for and considered when developing interactive social robots to be deployed for such children.