Methodological Framework to set up educational and therapy sessions with IROMEC

This document is part of the products of the IROMEC European project, developed by the University of Valle d’Aosta, as one of the Consortium partners and responsible of the most theoretical aspects of the project itself, related to play and children with disabilities. In particular, this document concerns two intertwined aspects: from one hand, the development of a general methodological framework to set up a fruitful and effective matching process between the child’s competence and ability and the robot’s technological features, to develop and realize interesting and useful play scenarios. On the other hand, an indepth study on the existing literature about the experimental evaluation of the infant play, especially in the case of children with some type of disabilities.
Thus, the document is structured into two Sections, one per each concerned aspect; it is also accompanied by three appendices.
In Section I, the Methodological Framework – one of the IROMEC final results – is presented and described; it will be the basis for one of the main final publications of IROMEC, that is the Guidelines for using robots in educational and therapy sessions for children with disabilities.
One of the primary scopes of this framework is to match technical and psycho-pedagogical issues both to clinical challenges and demands and to technological features: to this purpose, a strict connection with the items of the WHO’s International Classification of Functioning – Children and Youth (ICF-CY) has been established.
The scientific background for the definition of this framework has been found – and widely used – in one of the IROMEC previous publication, Analysis of Critical Factors involved in using interactive robots for education and therapy of children with disabilities.
In this Section a form is proposed – called Methodological Framework Form (shortly, MF-Form) – which is based on a very general methodology designed to support the evaluation phase of the experimental trials, both with the IROMEC prototype in different test sites defined with the Consortium partners and with other available robotics devices.
The aim of the MF-Form (Addendum A – MF-Form) is to test the effectiveness of play robots in rehabilitation and education of children with disabilities. It is intended to be easily and quickly filled in and it is also strictly dependent on – and linked to – other results and products of IROMEC: scenarios, objectives of scenarios, robot design and technical features.
It will help to collect information useful for choosing and applying the play scenarios that have been developed within IROMEC, and it will give back useful data about the effectiveness of the established connections between the child, the robot and the scenario, thus allowing the generalisation from the specific case to a more comprehensive and general approach.
To make it easier to fill in the form, an electronic version is being developed, to speed up the process of data input, to automatize some procedures of selection and, finally, to analyse the information collected by all the partners in the test sites.
The MF-Form is also strictly linked to other results and products of the project, such as play scenarios, objectives of play scenarios, robot design and technical features and for this reason it should be considered a work-in-progress until the end of the project itself.
An important phase of the Methodological Framework development process is the evaluation of the educational/rehabilitative outcomes of the intervention realised to improve the child’s functioning, activities and participation. This scope – related to evaluation and outcome measurement – is partially shared with other partners of the Consortium.
The contribution