For release on the World Autism Awareness Day, April 2nd, 20211
LuxAI Launches QTrobot for Home, The First-Ever In-Home AI Tutor for Autistic Children
QTrobot brings special needs education to homes to help children learn social, emotional and cognitive Skills
LuxAI announces the launch of QTrobot for Home, an engaging social robot playmate that helps children with autism to learn and practice new social, emotional, and cognitive skills. Due to the pandemic, parents of children with special needs are taking on more of the responsibility for their child’s education than ever before. After several years of experience in offering QTrobot to schools and research institutes, LuxAI now aims to support parents by offering their robot to families. QTrobot is designed with children in mind, it smiles engagingly, speaks softly, and creates an accessible and effective play-based setup for special needs education at home.
“We are launching the parent version of QTrobot after a highly successful pilot with our beta testers. We are delighted to see we can help parents to continue their children’s education during the covid-19 closure of schools”, Says Dr. Pouyan Ziafati, CEO of LuxAI. “Following our successful work in research and education, we have gone to great lengths to minimize costs and make this advanced robot as affordable as possible. QTrobot is now available for parents on luxai.com. We are offering the same robot platform and content as the QTrobot professional version which is valued around $10k, to parents from $1,977 for the robot device and $149 per month for ongoing support”, added Dr Ziafati.
Jay and Catherine, whose six-year-old boy has autism and has been using QTrobot for over a year say it has changed their lives. “When we first decided to get an educational robot, we were unsure what to expect, but now we are thrilled we decided to get QT. We are able to help our son all year round. Our son has acquired new knowledge and has developed new skills. It was QTrobot who showed him how to wave hi, which we could not get him to do before then. We feel very fortunate and grateful to have an educational robot in our home. Without QT, we really wouldn’t have much help from anywhere else during the pandemic, and we would be without any answers to help our son. QTrobot is simply a miracle for autistic children and their parents.”
QTrobot engages children with meaningful play-based activities based on evidence-based practices, such as Applied Behavior Analysis, and the results of years of research on child development and social-emotional trainings. The expressive robot comes with an endless array of learning programs covering a broad range of skills related to social and emotional wellbeing, language development, communication and cognitive skills. The programs are designed to begin teaching at the child’s current skill level, while gradually increasing the complexity and difficulty of the games. The in-house special education team at LuxAI continually broadens the curricula and is collaborating with several autism professionals in the EU and USA to ensure research and development are continually ongoing.
Scientific and empirical studies show QTrobot is truly bringing added value to special needs education. QTrobot improves attention and motivation and reduces anxiety and distraction. In one research study (1), children with autism were shown to have a higher attention span, longer focus and have fewer disruptive behaviours when working with QTrobot compared to a person. It has been also shown by University of Luxembourg researchers (2) that a 7-session emotional ability training conducted by QTrobot can improve the mental health of children with autism, reduce their emotional difficulties and help them to have higher emotional appropriateness in social situations.
“QTrobot is non-judgmental and offers a predictable environment for children to practice and gain confidence with social, emotional, and communication skills before applying them in real world interactions. What makes QTrobot unique is that it is a child friendly technology that also fully involves the parent in the sessions,” Says Dr. Aida Nazari, Head of Human-AI Interaction at LuxAI. “The robot works as a mediator of joint attention, creating a triangular interaction with the parents and their child. In this way, children are encouraged to practice the skills they learn from the robot with their parents. This opens the first door toward building skills that can be generalized to the natural interactions we have in the real world.”
LuxAI has developed a full ecosystem to assist parents in actively participating in their child’s education with QTrobot and to further conduct supporting activities to encourage the application of the skills learnt from the robot to new environments. QTrobot package for home includes:
- Online parent support portal with educational materials and video lessons for parents to effectively assist their child’s education through activities both with and without QTrobot. It also includes manuals with extra-curricular activities to help generalize the learnt skills.
- A reporting and analytics dashboard to help parents in evaluating and monitoring their children’s progress on educational milestones, navigate the educational curriculums and create an individualized learning plan that is developmentally appropriate and aligned with their child’s educational needs.
- Monthly parent support meetings to help parents assess their child’s progress and set upcoming goals.
Parents ordering QTrobot for home also have a one-month no-questions-asked-return option during which they can evaluate the QTrobot to make sure it meets their child’s unique educational needs and preferences.
About LuxAI:
Span off from the University of Luxembourg in April 2016, LuxAI is an internationally acclaimed science-based company created by a team of researchers, AI & Robotics experts, healthcare professionals and child development specialists aiming to address the shortage of special education services worldwide. The company is pioneering the development of human-centered intelligent systems to make standard and evidence-based methods of education accessible for children with neurodevelopmental disorders. LuxAI is pioneering interactive social robotics and building humanoid robots that can connect and collaborate with humans in an emotional and empathetic manner. The flagship product of LuxAI, QTrobot is a platform used by top research institutes and therapy centers in 14 countries around the world and has received several prestigious awards such as the CES 2019 honoree of Tech for a Better World, the Top 10 Best Ideas of Europe by the European Commission, and the Outstanding Research-Driven Innovation Award of the Luxembourg National Research Fund.
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References:
(1) More Attention and Less Repetitive and Stereotyped Behaviors using a Robot with Children with Autism, Andreia P. Costa, Louise Charpiot, Francisco Rodríguez Lera, Pouyan Ziafati1, Aida Nazarikhorram1, Leendert van der Torre, and Georges Steffgen, University of Luxembourg
(2) Mental Health Benefits of a Robot-Mediated Emotional Ability Training for Children with Autism: An Exploratory Study, A. P. Costa1, L. Kirsten2, L. Charpiot3 and G. Steffgen4, (1)University of Luxembourg, Esch sur Alzette, LUXEMBOURG, (2)University of Trier, Trier, Germany, (3)University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg, (4)Institute for Health and Behaviour, University of Luxembourg,