Abstract
Social robots are increasingly being used as a medi-ator in robot-assisted autism therapy to improve children's social and cognitive skills. Engagement is one of the key measurements used to evaluate the therapeutic interventions' effect on children. While “engagement” is broadly used, it has been challenging to find a consensus about its definition in the community. With this paper, we explore the use of a data-driven approach to investigate the extent to which a model on engagement built on one dataset transfers to another. We utilized two publicly available datasets of engagement recognition, namely PInSoRo and Qamqor datasets, with an attempt to achieve a higher accuracy taking into account the transferred knowledge. The accuracy of 83.18% was obtained on the PInSoRo dataset of child-child interactions with face and body keypoints. We have used the methodology of transfer learning to improve the classification accuracy on the Qamqor dataset. The best result obtained is a 71.89% accuracy on the Qamqor dataset. This suggests that more data with similar keypoints is needed to achieve better accuracy when utilizing transfer learning from one dataset to another dataset.