  This research addressed whether interactions with social robots could
facilitate joint attention of the autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Two
conditions of initiators, namely 'Human' vs. 'Robot' were measured with 15
children with ASD and 15 age-matched typically developing (TD) children. Apart
from fixation and gaze transition, a new longest common subsequence (LCS)
approach was proposed to analyze eye-movement traces. Results revealed that
children with ASD showed deficits of joint attention. Compared to the human
agent, robot facilitate less fixations towards the targets, but it attracted
more attention and allowed the children to show gaze transition and to follow
joint attention logic. This results highlight both potential application of LCS
analysis on eye-tracking studies and of social robot to intervention.
