Fully robotic social environment for teaching and practicing affective interaction: Case of teaching emotion recognition skills to children with autism spectrum disorder, a pilot study.

21st century brought along a considerable decrease in social interactions, due to the newly emerged lifestyle around the world, which became more noticeable recently of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, children with autism spectrum disorder have further complications regarding their social interactions with other humans. In this paper, a fully Robotic Social Environment (RSE), designed to simulate the needed social environment for children, especially those with autism is described. An RSE can be used to simulate many social situations, such as affective interpersonal interactions, in which observational learning can take place. In order to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed RSE, it has been tested on a group of children with autism, who had difficulties in emotion recognition, which in turn, can influence social interaction. An A-B-A single case study was designed to show how RSE can help children with autism recognize four basic facial expressions, i.e., happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, through observing the social interactions of two robots speaking about these facial expressions. The results showed that the emotion recognition skills of the participating children were improved. Furthermore, the results showed that the children could maintain and generalize their emotion recognition skills after the intervention period. In conclusion, the study shows that the proposed RSE, along with other rehabilitation methods, can be effective in improving the emotion recognition skills of children with autism and preparing them to enter human social environments.

The effect of isotretinoin (roaccutane) therapy on depression and quality of life of patients with severe acne.

OBJECTIVE: Acne is the most common skin disease and isotretinoin is the most powerful drug among the various drugs used for its treatment, but it has some adverse effects. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of isotretinoin on depression and quality of life of a group of patients undergoing isotretinoin therapy before and after the treatment course. METHODS: In this prospective study, 98 patients with severe acne were enrolled consecutively and underwent isotretinoin therapy receiving 0.5 mg/kg/d of isotretinoin for 16 weeks. Isotretinoin effects on quality of life and depression were evaluated using Dermatology Life Quality Index (DLQI) and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) questionnaires, respectively. RESULTS: In this study, 98 patients suffering from severe acne (38 males and 60 females) were enrolled. Treatment of acne was associated with improvement of quality of life scores in both male and female patients (p = 0.001). Considering the cutoff value of 13 for mild depressive mood in the BDI score, in total, 48 (49%) of the enrolled patients (21 males and 33 females) had a mild depressive mood before the commencement of the treatment in this study. The analysis of before and after treatment BDI scores showed that the number of patients and also the mean score of BDI were increased in both male and female patients after the treatment (p<0.05). CONCLUSION: Isotretinoin therapy improved the quality of life of patients suffering from acne, but depression was accentuated in the patients to some extent.