Today, EU leaders will be speaking on the long-term effects of the digital revolution in Europe at the Tallinn Digital Summit in Estonia. As project leader on the DE-Enigma project, Vanessa Evers has been given the rare honour of presenting the project’s progress at the trade fair: a robot that is being developed to assist in therapy provided to autistic children.
More than five million Europeans have been diagnosed with autism. These individuals often struggle with verbal and non-verbal communication, making social interaction and understanding others challenging for them. It is a well-known fact that autistic children have an easier time communicating with humanoid robots than with people, as they can understand them better and perceive them as less threatening.
The DE-Enigma project – led by University of Twente project leader Vanessa Evers – includes artificial intelligence contributed by over fifty researchers from seven countries for the robot called Zeno. The robot is used to develop training programmes for autistic children, intended to help them recognize and express emotion. Zeno gets smarter as the project continues. So far, over 128 children in London and Belgrade have worked with the robot. The first results are very positive. Almost every child showed progress, such as an improvement of their ability to start and maintain social relationships with others and improved communication skills. The project will continue until August 2019 and so far over 25 scientific articles have been published on its progress.
Partners within DE-Enigma, funded by the EU Horizon 2020 programme, are: University of Twente, Imperial College London, University of Passau, the Institute of Mathematics Simion Stoilov (Romania), University College London, the Serbian Society of Autism, Autism Europe and IDMIND (Portugal).
