Developing accessible robots and playful activities for children with disabilities: Multidisciplinary Guidelines for developers, reviewers, educational professionals and researcher

What is or can be the role of robots in defining play activities for all, where children with disabilities can interact with their peers? In the last years many robots are becoming part of the set of devices present in many homes, schools, and social or care centers. As part of this global movement, robots also started to involve persons with disabilities, giving them the innovative possibility to interact with an artificial device, properly programmed; in the case of children, they have been mostly developed to support play, the prominent activity in childhood, to enable them to play well, satisfactorily, autonomously, happily. This scope can be achieved now, by adopting a multidisciplinary approach, because children's needs are varied and complex, as well as their ludic preferences and the contexts where they live: to propose them meaningful and pleasant play experiences, knowledge from different disciplinary areas must be put together. After some considerations about the peculiar aspects faced in the last years by researchers involved in this specific multidisciplinary area, the paper presents Guidelines to develop play activities based on robots, addressed to children with disabilities.