Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have deficits in social interaction and expressing and understanding emotions. Based on this, robots for children with ASD have been proposed. However, few studies have been conducted about how to design a social robot for children with ASD. Non-experimental studies have been carried out to evaluate social robots; however, the general methodology that should be used to design a social robot is not clear. This study proposes a design path for a social robot for emotional communication for children with ASD following a user-centered design approach. This design path was applied to a case study and evaluated by a group of experts in psychology, human-robot interaction, and human-computer interaction from Chile and Colombia, as well as parents of children with ASD. Our results show that following the proposed design path for a social robot to communicate emotions for children with ASD is favorable.
Keywords: autism spectrum disorder; human–robot interaction; user-centered design.