“MyRot”, the “robot tree” that helps minors with autism in Panama

“MyRot” is the first robot shaped like the characteristic “pot-bellied tree”, developed by a group of researchers from Panama, to help minors with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD / Autism) in the Central American country in their learning.

With a height of 150 centimeters, decorated in greenish tones, accompanied by leaves and a tablet in the heart with a cartoon face, the “tree” allows therapists to facilitate the learning processes of minors with autism, reinforcing their auditory attention , concentration, visual perception, social integration, reading comprehension and interpretation of expressions.

“We wanted to create a platform that supports the management made by institutions with children with special needs to develop a digitization tool in the teaching, learning and traceability process,” Leonel González, the principal investigator of the project, told Efe.

González, father of a minor with autism spectrum, explained that it is “a tool so that therapists can propose different types of activities” and with the help of “technology to make a small perimetry of the child, to know their degree of acceptance or emotional impact” .

The ancient “pot-bellied tree” that gives information to the “cloud”

“MyRot” is a representation of the pot-bellied tree of Panama that expresses gestures and emits the voice of the specialist through a speaker, which in a “first stage is a digital puppet, in which the teacher or therapist has an ‘app’ in his cell phone through which he speaks into his microphone and manipulates gestures “.

“The therapist can gradually change the emotions and interact with the child. The language does not matter because it is the professional who speaks,” added González.

A “traceability and new protocols are generated that translate what was done on paper and by hand, but now it is a product oriented to the cloud, within the security processes, so that not only the information can be found by a therapist but also by the family. , since the therapy processes are digital “.

“We chose the pot-bellied tree because it is the representation of the Baobabs in Africa, where it has many stories, or the Bottle Body of Madagascar that many children see cartoons,” González clarified.

This “ancestral tree represents a story of ‘bullying’ and how in the end it recognizes its difference, which makes it special and more so because of this climate change issue because this tree contains a lot of water in its trunk, hence pot-bellied”, he explained. .

More than 15,000 minors benefited and a new investigation

The robot tree, financed by the National Secretariat of Science, Technology and Innovation (Senacyt) with $ 30,000, is developed with Dart language and Javascript by a research group, among which is a child under 15 years of age who collaborated with the web platform of the application.

Of the eight “robot trees” developed, six were donated to the Panamanian Institute for Special Habilitation, at national headquarters, one to the Young People with Disabilities Labor Foundation (Jadis), while the rest remains in the hands of researchers to advance in the project.

Thus, the project will benefit 15,774 students from the special training centers, with other types of needs.

Although the researchers still do not have preliminary results of the impact of the tool, they hope that next year the first investigation will start, already endorsed by the Bioethics Committees of the University of Panama.

“The only sample we have with the children was at the Book Fair, where they can go up to 40,000, there the tree only told stories. But we realized that children with characteristics of autistic syndrome were the ones who had the greatest affinity,” he said. .

“So we decided to start with children on the autism spectrum; eventually it will be done with Down Syndrome and others ”, he concluded. (I)