Investigating the challenges and applications of socialrobots in special education: an overview

Today, robots have found a prominent role in our human lives. In recent years, social robots have become a part of all kinds of human activities, especially in programs such as entertainment, education, companionship that include children, the interest of this work is in the interaction of social robots with children in the field of special education. The aim of this research was to systematically investigate the application and challenges of using robots in special education.

To identify the challenges and application of social robots, two documentary methods and reference groups have been used. At the beginning and after examining the related sources, a total of 355 sources were identified, 26 of which were evaluated more precisely based on the criteria of usefulness. After the multi-stage analysis and extracting the findings, the relatively common cases were combined with each other and categorized into three main areas, dimensions and quality indicators. In the next step, after checking the validity of the findings by the peer review method, these findings were refined according to the conditions.

The results showed that social robots were effective in achieving therapeutic and educational goals, especially for supporting children with special needs.

This study showed a large number of attempts to apply social robots in the special education of children with different disabilities, especially in recent years, as well as a wide variety of social robots from the market that are involved in such activities. Also, considering the colorful role that robots can play in education, especially special education, and considering the previous findings that indicated the positive effects of social robots in the education and treatment of children with special needs. The main result of this work is that the specific field of application of social robots is in the first step of development, however, it is expected that it will receive the attention of the research community in the coming years.