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Robotics has made it possible to change and improve many support processes for vulnerable people in different settings. In recent years, its use has been oriented toward supporting therapeutic interventions of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD), including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This review of the literature highlights how advances in robotics have evolved in different scenarios of ADHD treatment, its collaboration with other emerging technologies, its results, its limitations, and the research challenges for the future development of robotics in the field of supporting children with ADHD. The authors conducted a literature review based on the location of keywords ‘robotics’ and several NNDs such as ‘ADHD’, ’Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)’, ‘cerebral palsy’, and ‘dementia’ in titles, abstracts, and introduction of scientific articles in the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) database. The reviewed literature was classified according to the type of therapy supported by the robots, the type of robot and the associated technologies. From this analysis, we can solve the research question: Which types of robots have the potential for specific applications in ADHD treatment? Furthermore, this article shows that despite favorable technical results, robotic technologies that support ADHD therapies require significant improvements in terms of scalability, human-machine interaction, and treatment and processing of acquired information to be applied effectively in real-world therapies. The most significant research challenges are proposed to drive research efforts to develop new approaches to enable robotic assistants to participate in ADHD therapies.

Robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) support various processes in many scenarios of modern life such as e-health and psychological treatments. This article presents the design, development, implementation, and assessment of a Robotic Assistant (RA), named “Atent@”, as a support tool in the homework activities of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Interacting with the children the RA helps them correct their bad habits and misbehavior caused by the disorder. Its features and functionalities were designed by therapists, implementing AI algorithms to process information and make decisions in real-time to help children to be focused on their homework. This RA interacts with smart objects deployed at home, which are associated with the activity under observation (desk and chair). This solution allows therapists to receive more accurate information about the homework sessions inside the home. At the same time, remote interaction with the child is made possible (through the RA) to provide new instructions and support him/her along with the sessions. This RA is a significant evolution of an earlier version. All the improvements brought to the project by the modifications in technical and qualitative features are explained. Furthermore, the experiment and its results are presented to illustrate the clinical potential. This project shows that the RA can not only make observations with a high degree of precision like an expert (teacher/therapist) but also positively influences the homework performance of children with and without ADHD.

The Central Nervous System of humans continuously evolves when children engage in new activities. These activities are progressing from learning to eat as a baby over playing during childhood up to homework in all its dimensions. These activities, which are meaningful and relevant to everyone, constitute what occupational therapists call “occupations”. The successful execution of these occupations makes the development of new roles as well as the construction of a correct state of health possible. Due to these reasons, occupational performance is a fundamental part of development throughout childhood. Homework is complex and extends beyond the school context to the home. For many children, the performance of these homework items is a difficult challenge or even impossible to overcome without the help of an adult. This article presents the design, implementation, and functional validation of an intelligent home environment that uses homework activities as a support tool for children with or without attention disabilities. In this project, the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is combined with the development of robotic assistance to implement an intelligent home environment. In this environment, we have included intelligent things (where the usual study chairs and desks become smart objects) that determine in real-time the child's behavior during the development of homework and a robotic assistant which interacts with the children providing the necessary accompaniment (supervision and guidelines) just as a therapist would do. This development has been functionally validated by tests on several school-aged children without pathologies. In a later phase of the study, the proposal will be validated with children with different pathologies with an impact on learning, including Attention Disorder Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The goal is the generation of intelligent places for therapeutic purposes within the home as assistance for children having difficulties to work with their homework assignment due to ADHD.