Saturday 09 / November / 2024
Muscat: Two final-year students of Sohar University took the spotlight at COMEX 2018 with their creation: a robot built to help kids with autism in the Sultanate.
Video: Watch this robot dance to traditional Omani music — and PPAP!
Standing in the “innovators” pavilion with two Information Technology students was Nao, the humanoid robot. Nao is specifically designed to help children with autism learn, communicate, and perform day-to-day chores.
“This is the brain child of our supervisor, Dr. Jabar H. Yousuf, and we have been working on it for some eight months now,” said S. M. Shadman Shahriar, final-year student at the Department of Information Technology, Sohar University.
“Through our literature survey, we analysed that kids with autism like to interact with technology. Therefore, we implemented some eight programmes in this robot that will be in the Arabic language. Currently, the robot is programmed in 19 languages, but our emphasis is more on Arabic,” said Shahriar.
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“It has to be understood that there are different levels of autism and Nao is solely designed to help kids with a mild syndrome,” he added. Another student and Shahriar’s project partner Al Waddah Al-Abdulsalam said they took inspiration from the robot named Dream in the United Kingdom.
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“We studied the results of using robots with autistic kids and were surprised to discover that their improvement was much faster, as compared to when they interacted with human beings,” he said.
“Our aim is to make kids integrated with the society faster. Since it is a neurological problem and there is no cure yet, we decided to help these kids and be at their disposal through this creation,” Al Abdulsalam added.
