Marking the 7th year since Prof. Dautenhahn joined Canada 150 Research Chairs, her work is highlighted in an interview.
Prof. Dautenhahn, who relocated to Canada from the UK in 2018, had not previously considered a move to the country. “To the surprise of everyone, the first time I entered Canada was for my job interview in January 2018,” she noted. The decision to come to Waterloo was influenced by the unstable research funding climate in post-Brexit Britain.
Prof. Dautenhahn did pioneering work in the UK to develop robot-assisted therapy for children on the autism spectrum, a technique that went on to gain popularity around the world. At the University of Waterloo, she has expanded her research to include more children with speech and language difficulties. She has launched projects with local organizations such as the KidsAbility Centre for Child Development in Waterloo and Kick Start Therapy in Brampton. The goal is to use robots to make therapy and education fun for children who have difficulties with, for example, stuttering.
She is also collaborating with a diverse group of Waterloo researchers, who have backgrounds in optometry, engineering and psychology, to develop a social robot to help children with the medical condition amblyopia, sometimes called “lazy eye”.
“Children and robots, it’s a match made in heaven,” Dautenhahn says. “Nearly all children love robots.”
In the next year or two, two projects she has high hopes for taking from the lab into the real world are a robot as a public speaking coach, and another as a mental health support for students at the university.
“It’s very difficult to get into the University of Waterloo, and our students are working really, really hard,” says Dautenhahn. “So I want to do something where my research can give back and help them.”
Source: Canada 150 Research Chairs website