Martha-Bot: Un asistente robótico para el soporte en la enseñanza de habilidades de orientación espacial a niños con discapacidad intelectual leve y moderada

According to the latest United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates, in Latin America and the Caribbean, nearly 19.1 million children live with disabilities. In this line, 24% of children with disabilities are likely to less to receive early stimulation and responsive care. In developing countries such as Ecuador, there are not enough personnel and technological tools for providing therapy and early estimulation to children with Intellectual Disability (ID). For these reasons, in this paper we present a robotic assistant to help these children developing spatial orientation, an essential skill to later develop superior skills such as reading, writing or being able to locate oneself in a certain space. A team of experts evaluated the robotic assistant with the objective to determining the real feasibility of using it with children with ID. The Kendall rank correlation coefficient was used to determine the agreement level between experts, and the achieved results show a moderate agreement level (p-value 0.00856).