  Children and adults with cerebral palsy (CP) can have involuntary upper limb
movements as a consequence of the symptoms that characterize their motor
disability, leading to difficulties in communicating with caretakers and peers.
We describe how a socially assistive robot may help individuals with CP to
practice non-verbal communicative gestures using an active orthosis in a
one-on-one number-guessing game. We performed a user study and data collection
with participants with CP; we found that participants preferred an embodied
robot over a screen-based agent, and we used the participant data to train
personalized models of participant engagement dynamics that can be used to
select personalized robot actions. Our work highlights the benefit of
personalized models in the engagement of users with CP with a socially
assistive robot and offers design insights for future work in this area.
