Engaging Persons with Neuro-Developmental Disorder with a Plush Social Robot

The use of social robots in interventions for persons with Neuro-Developmental Disorder (NDD) has been explored in several studies. This paper describes a plush social robot with an elephant appearance called ELE that acts as conversational companion and has been designed to promote NDD persons engagement persons during interventions. We also present the initial evaluation of ELE and the preliminary results in terms of visual attention improvement in a storytelling context.