Leka’s mission is to help exceptional children live exceptional lives. Their first product, Leka, is a cute spherical smart toy to help take care of children with special needs.

Parents and therapists of children with special needs often struggle to help them engage with their surroundings and make progress in different areas of learning. Relaxing colors, soothing movements and vibrations, sounds and music… Leka offers a full range of sensory stimulations, able to spark curiosity, enjoyment and encourage social interaction. Leka can thus mediate the relationship between the child and their adult caregivers.

Backed by an extensive R&D approach & guided by a board of established experts, Leka is designed to interact with children through educational apps that engage their motor, cognitive & emotional skills — reinforcing cognitive & social learning. The device is controlled through a partnered app via BLE. A monitoring platform will track the child’s developmental progress over time and serve as a communication medium between parents, caregivers & therapists.

APF France Handicap acquired Leka in March 2019. The teams work together to develop and to update the product to offer the best experience to children with autism.

BENEFITS TO USE THE 3DEXPERIENCE PLATFORM

Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE Platform can take Leka to the next step by

• Mentoring the team on CATIA Modeling, Systems Engineering and SIMULIA Structural Analysis to build a robust product
• Connecting the robot to SOLIDWORKS Apps for Kids application so that they can experiment with the robot and figure out new ways of integrating the two.
•  Helping to create a digital twin of the Leka device using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and integrate features including eye tracking, emotional and behavioral response and feedback. This will help not only to optimize the design but can Leka’s customers/partner institutions to train caregivers and parents on the robot

Explore creative ways of integrating IoT and Data Science in the software of the robot for it to help build a SELF-OPTIMIZING, ALWAYS LEARNING Robot.

POSITIVE IMPACT ON THE SOCIETY

GOAL 4: QUALITY EDUCATION

Leka ensures inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Being a robot, Leka is both predictable and stable in its interactions, which is very important for the child's sense of safety and serenity. Leka caters to the specific needs of the kids and focuses on sensory and motor stimulations such as music, colors, mouvements and vibrations. Leka will really help parents, carers and doctors, take care of the children in a smarter and more connected way.

COLLABORATIVE & COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

Through their sensors, all the Leka in the world will record data on how children are interacting with them. We will then provide parents and therapists with insightful information about their children progress. But that’s not all. We want to gather this data and make is available to researchers, because we believe that is only together that we can understand and discover patterns. Correlation between the children, their specificities, and the activities that help them progress faster will be shared so that everyone can benefit from it through new educational content.

So essentially learning experiences from one part of the world can be applied to others contexts using the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform. Data Collected from different robots across the world will help improve its program using Machine Learning, and can be used a diagnostic and performance tracking tool across the world.