Could the Next Patient You Treat in Your ABA Master’s Practicum Be a Robot?
Every college-educated, Board-certified, state-licensed applied behavioral analyst has met stringent experience requirements in order to become an ABA therapist. Currently, that means stacking up 1,500 to 2,000 hours of supervised fieldwork, on top of any practicum or internship work performed as part of a degree program. That fieldwork involves direct evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment of patients in a variety of populations with a range of behavioral issues. It’s an essential part of developing and honing your skills as a therapist as well as becoming licensed.
The individuals you treat during this field experience are a sample of who you will interact with as a therapist: young and old, experiencing a range of mental or physical ailments, each with families looking to you for help.
But in the future, they may actually be robots.
That’s the hope at California State University Northridge’s KLab, at least, where researchers have been using small, cute, humanoid robots programmed with surprisingly lifelike behavioral issues to provide training simulations to study caregiver responses.
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The Alderbaran NAO H-25 looks like it has stepped right out of a Star Wars movie, with wide eyes, a fixed expression, and colorful body highlights. But when programmed to simulate a child throwing a tantrum and self-harming, it can be stunningly lifelike… and surprisingly disturbing.
This offers an ability for instructors to tailor training encounters around the exact kinds of situations they want students to master. While dealing with human patients in-person will always be an important part of ABA master’s degree programs and experiential learning placements, it is always a hit or miss environment for teaching specific skills. Therapists, even in training, must respond to the behavioral issues they are presented with. Those aren’t always what they need the most practice with, however.
The robotic simulation allows instructors to dial up the exact scenarios students must master. It also allows them to let students engage with situations—such as the self-harm scenario outlined above—that would be dangerous or unethical in the real world. And even though it’s a machine, seeing a robot throw a tantrum still comes with a more visceral impact than an instructor reading a scenario off a sheet of paper.
Ai-Driven Robots Will Come With Lifelike Responses To Behavioral Training
With AI trained on actual behavioral patterns from real human patients, they not only set an initial condition for students to respond to, they can also realistically and dynamically react to different treatment methods.
The H-25 models come with tactical and pressure sensors, and have speakers, microphones, and object recognition software. It can sense the therapist, hear what they are saying, and react autonomously. It will look at you when you are speaking, reply to what you say, even look like it’s blinking.
With more advanced AI packed into their little heads, in the future those robots may be able to do even more — react to treatment just as real patients might.
The Large Language Models (LLMs) behind modern chatbots can already simulate conversations in various mind-states and at different ages and levels of development. Within a few years, you can see how those language skills could be dropped into an android and coupled with behavioral reactions for hyper-real training scenarios.
Today, the robots are mostly used in research scenarios. But soon, they could be coming to a classroom near you as a training aid.
Your Expertise in Robotic Patient Treatment May Go Beyond the Classroom
If artificial intelligence is able to simulate patients in various stages of mental or physical distress, why not simulate therapists?
We’ve already discussed how AI is being used to juice the performance of ABA therapists in a variety of ways. Of course, this isn’t unique to ABA—this is an approach that is already seeing widespread adoption in the world of mental health therapy. Some of the oldest experiments with AI were in delivering talk-based therapy with human clients. Today, apps that can deliver cognitive-behavioral therapy and other treatment modalities without any active human therapist are popping up all over.
Of course, that’s no different from almost any area in which AI is finding traction today. Companies are incorporating AI into everything from customer service to executive-level strategic decision-making.
There’s a common thread in all this, though, one that is easy for a trained behaviorist to spot: AI is being asked to adopt a set of behaviors in line with the expectations that people have for services in all these fields.
Behaviorism is a field that lives and dies around the predictable rhythm of antecedent-behavior-consequence, the so-called ABCs of ABA. Consistent and predictable feedback – consequences – in response to a wide ranging variety of patient behaviors are a hallmark, but that level consistency and predictability still alludes AI programmers. ABAs working to train AI may offer the solution, though.
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ABAs of the future might not only be developing their skills by training with robots: some of their clients out in the real world may be AI models, too.
Some AI developers are already incorporating behavioral data into their machine learning models to create more accurate and more effective machines. It’s not a common approach today because of the complexity of the data and interpretation.
But this is exactly what ABAs are trained to do.
Today, only the top AI development firms and research universities are hiring ABAs to dive into those mysteries. But as AI deployment becomes more widespread and corporations begin tailoring the tools to their own needs, it may not be long before behavior analysts are browsing job ads for Robot Therapy and Training.
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That may open up an entirely new population for AIs to practice in. Their understanding of how human behavior does work in practice may be the critical piece to building the theory that will allow AI to truly deliver useful and reliable results.
Along the way, they may unlock some new mysteries in human behavior, too. It turns out that humans themselves adjust their behaviors when training or interacting with AI versus when performing the same tasks with other humans.
Understanding how and why that occurs may be one of the keys to cultivating deeper AI/human partnerships and creating useful tools.
Getting the Education You Need To Meet the Future
As if it wasn’t enough that ABA therapists have to master functional behavior assessments, play therapy, and CBI (Cognitive Behavioral Intervention), they may in the near future need to develop a whole new skillset: programming.
Behavioral Change Technology is already an important part of the curriculum at both graduate and undergraduate applied behavior analysis degree programs. The degree to which people change their own behaviors inadvertently through technology is a major part of ABA practice today… everything from social media-triggered depression to video game addiction cases are likely to turn up in your client roster.
And ABAs have quickly adapted technology for various treatment purposes, too. There’s no reason the same training can’t go in the other direction, though. If you learn enough to use an app for patient treatment, then you probably already have a good idea how you might treat the app itself.
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Of course, all this calls into question the future of ABA jobs and careers. Like any other profession that may be automated by AI, therapists have to be wondering if they will be completely replaced by machines. That’s particularly true if they are using their expertise to train the machines.
Robotics is one of the most complex AI technologies, as well as one of the riskiest, and it’s something that will take years of development to perfect.
Obviously, as the technology becomes more widely used, there will be shifts in the job market. But ABAs are uniquely positioned to benefit from their expertise in some of the most human qualities that AI might want to adopt.
Even as AI evolves, it’s most likely to evolve as a complement to human ABA therapists rather than a replacement. To that end, ABA students who have been trained by AI and in concert with robotic simulators may have a real edge in the job market. Once you are familiar with the technology, it’s not just something that can teach you—it’s something you are better able to use in your own practice.
