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This study engaged five autistic adults in a co-design session to identify essential features for a social robot aimed at enhancing social-cognition training. The findings reveal that participants prefer the robot to act as a scaffold for learning rather than a companion, emphasizing the need for authenticity, personalized feedback, and respect for privacy. Seven key design themes emerged, highlighting the importance of configurability and real-world rehearsal support to foster independence among autistic adults.
Autistic adults envision social robots not as companions, but as customizable rehearsal partners that enhance their social independence.
Social robots have been widely explored as tools for autism intervention, yet this literature has focused predominantly on children and has rarely involved autistic adults as active contributors to design. This creates a mismatch between existing systems and the social-cognitive challenges autistic adults actually face in everyday life, including navigating ambiguous interpersonal contexts, managing conversational timing, and interpreting implied emotional meaning. To address this gap, we conducted an online focus group and co-design session with five autistic adults to explore what a social robot for social-cognition training should do, how it should interact, and under what conditions it would be genuinely useful. The 90-minute session combined open discussion with structured co-design activities on a shared digital whiteboard, and the resulting verbal and visual data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The analysis yielded seven themes that define core design requirements: the robot should function as a scaffold rather than a substitute, prioritise authenticity over comfort, provide personalised and user-controlled feedback, accommodate emotional self-awareness gaps, respect privacy and contextual boundaries, support rehearsal for real-world social situations, and remain configurable in identity, form, and expression. Together, the findings suggest that autistic adults envision the robot not as a companion or live social assistant, but as a private, configurable rehearsal partner designed to support independence over time.
