Toward Robot-Assisted Psychosocial Techniques for Sound Stimulation of Children Born with Hearing Loss

Hearing and speech rehabilitation in children born with hearing loss can be called neurodevelopmental emergency because when the brain is not stimulated by sounds, it reorganizes itself and maximizes the processing of information via other sensory systems that gradually occupy the regions of the audio centers in the brain. The proposed interactive robot-assisted psychosocial intervention for intensive sound stimulation has been developed by speech therapists and technical scientists. The humanoid robot Pepper, developed by SoftBank, has been chosen as an assistant. In this paper a research protocol for intensive sound stimulation via the interactive humanoid robot is proposed. This protocol can be easily personalized to the family daily routine and automatically adapted by the robot according to the special educational needs of the toddler.