Robot brings hope to kids with learning difficulties

A robot named Cosmo has become six-year-old Kevin Fitzgerald's unlikely ally in his uphill everyday battle with developmental difficulties. At a strip mall clinic in suburban Maryland, Kevin is at the unlikely intersection of new efforts to treat symptoms of autism, cerebral palsy and other developmental disorders with robotics and computer work.

A robot named Cosmo has become six-year-old Kevin Fitzgerald's unlikely ally in his uphill everyday battle with developmental difficulties.

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At a strip mall clinic in suburban Maryland, Kevin is at the unlikely intersection of new efforts to treat symptoms of autism, cerebral palsy and other developmental disorders with robotics and computer work.

Here, he scrambles onto a swivel chair to examine a half-metre tall robot on the table in front of him.

Prodding four brightly-coloured buttons near the robot's feet, he directs a cartoon version of the machine around a computer monitor, furtively glancing up at the real thing for encouragement.

Kevin showed the first signs of learning difficulties when he was 18 months old, and was later diagnosed with developmental dyspraxia.

"It is like having a stroke," his mother Patty Fitzgerald said. "His brain is intact, but his body doesn't do what he wants it to do."

Some specific skills -- like pronouncing consonants, matching cause and effect or grasping relative concepts such as better and faster -- can be depressingly difficult for him to master.

But for the last year, a small blue-and-yellow android called Cosmo has offered some hope.