Leka

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.

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.

LEKA leverages the Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE Platform to advance its robotic solutions in several key ways:

• Product Development: The platform provides mentorship in CATIA Modeling, Systems Engineering, and SIMULIA Structural Analysis, helping LEKA build a robust and reliable robot.
• Educational Integration: LEKA connects its robot to the SOLIDWORKS Apps for Kids, enabling children to experiment with the robot and explore innovative ways to integrate technology and learning.
• Digital Twin & Simulation: Using the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform, LEKA creates a digital twin of the robot, integrating features like eye tracking, emotional and behavioral response, and feedback. This optimizes design and allows partner institutions and caregivers to train effectively with the robot.
• IoT and Data Science: The platform enables exploration of IoT and data-driven approaches, helping LEKA develop a self-optimizing, always-learning robot that adapts to users’ needs over time.

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.