A mechatronic shirt kit to enhance psychomotor and life skills in autistic children: a pilot study

Training autistic children has become a global challenge, as the number of children diagnosed with it is increasing drastically. The conventional therapies to train autistic children have their own limitations. Technology-enabled training kits can be developed to help impart psychomotor skills to these children. Studies have reported that robot or robot-like features attract autistic children. Taking this as a leverage, in this work, a mechatronic kit has been developed to impart psychomotor and cognitive skills that are useful in day-to-day activities, especially when wearing a shirt. The psychomotor skills addressed are pincer grasp, elbow movement and hand-eye coordination, while the cognitive skills addressed are identification of shirt, colour identification and matching. Pilot trials have been conducted with seven autistic children to study how useful the kit is in imparting the targeted skills. The trials consisted of pre-assessment, training, and post-assessment sessions, having 15 tasks spanning over 7 sessions and 68 trials. After the training, from pre-assessment to post-assessment, an improvement of around 80% has been observed in the Daily Life Skills (DLS) of connecting the shirt with velcros and its associated psychomotor skills.