LuxAI, the Luxembourg Institute of Health and the University of Birmingham have begun a long-term study examining whether a robot-led early development programme can be used at home to support young autistic children. The project will run until the end of 2026 and will involve 69 families.
The study is funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund and the Luxembourg Ministry of the Economy. It will assess QTrobot, a humanoid social robot developed by LuxAI, as a tool to support children aged between 2.5 and 4.5 years in areas including communication, language, social skills and learning. QTrobot provides structured games and guided exercises that can be adapted to each child’s pace and is designed for use by families in a home setting.
Researchers will follow participating families in the West Midlands over a 10-month period. They will track child development and parental self-efficacy to evaluate how robot-assisted programmes may influence early developmental progress.
Representatives of the partner institutions said the project would examine the long-term effectiveness and usability of socially assistive robots in early support. They stated that earlier research had been limited to short-term or small-scale studies and that the collaboration aims to generate data on how home-based, robot-led programmes function in everyday conditions.
