HRI for Autism Inclusion

Naba Rizvi is wearing a pink tweed suit while holding a pink rose and smiling.

Are Robots Ready to Deliver Autism Inclusion?

Jump to: our paper, findings, our checklist to guide more inclusive future work

Autism is multi-dimensional and can be understood in a variety of ways. Some may use the medical model to define autism as a disorder, but this belief contributes to the marginalization we face in society. In contrast, 87% of autistic adults in the US view it as an identity. Neurodiversity is a term used to describe all the diverse ways our brains can differ from each others' and also includes other cool identities such as ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia, and many more! According to this framework, autism is a distinct neurotype, or unique way of thinking or expressing our thoughts.

Unfortunately, robotics research fails to include these diverse perspectives. Our latest paper quantifies the impact of this lack of inclusion in the ways we research, design, develop, and test robots for autistic people.

Video Summary (Subtitles on TikTok)

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Read our full paper and click here to cite it!

@inproceedings{10.1145/3613904.3642798,
                            author = {Rizvi, Naba and Wu, William and Bolds, Mya and Mondal, Raunak and Begel, Andrew and Munyaka, Imani N. S.},
                            title = {Are Robots Ready to Deliver Autism Inclusion?: A Critical Review},
                            year = {2024},
                            isbn = {9798400703300},
                            publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
                            address = {New York, NY, USA},
                            url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642798},
                            doi = {10.1145/3613904.3642798},
                            abstract = {The marginalization of autistic people in our society today is multi-faceted as it includes violence that is both physical and ideological in nature. It is rooted in the dehumanization, infantilization, and masculinization of autistic people and pervasive even in contemporary research studies that continue to echo ableist ideologies from the past. In this work, we identify how HRI research reproduces systemic social inequalities and explain how they align with historical misrepresentations, and other systemic barriers. We analyzed 142 papers focusing on HRI and autism published between 2016 and 2022. We critique these studies through a mixed-methods analysis of their definition of autism, study designs, participant recruitment, and results. Our findings indicate that HRI research stigmatizes autism in three dimensions - 1) the pathologization of autism, 2) gender and age-based essentialism, and 3) power imbalances. Our work uncovered that about 90\% of HRI research during the timeline explored excluded the perspectives of autistic people, particularly those from understudied groups. We recommend broadening the inclusion of autistic people, considering research objectives beyond clinical use, and diversifying collaborations, foundational works considered, \& participant demographics for more inclusive future work.},
                            booktitle = {Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
                            articleno = {69},
                            numpages = {18},
                            keywords = {autism, human-computer interaction, robotics},
                            location = {<conf-loc>, <city>Honolulu</city>, <state>HI</state>, <country>USA</country>, </conf-loc>},
                            series = {CHI '24}
                            }

Figures

Figure 1. More than 90% of HRI papers defined autism as an 'illness' and explored ways to diagnose or 'treat' it in their studies. This graph is interactive: you can hide any category by clicking on its corresponding label.

Figure 2. Less than 10% of HRI papers (shown in pink) included a representative sample of women and girls with autism in their studies. The majority (in yellow) did not report the participants' gender demographics.

Our Checklist

We developed this checklist specifically for HRI researchers to assess the inclusivity of their work. However, it may also be useful for other researchers. Click here to download the PDF and here to download the latex file to incorporate in your paper(s).

our checklist for HRI researchers.