Learning companion robots for young children are increasingly adopted in informal learning environments. Although parents play a pivotal role in their children’s learning, very little is known about how parents prefer to incorporate robots into their children’s learning activities. We developed prototype capabilities for a learning companion robot to deliver educational prompts and responses to parent-child pairs during reading sessions and conducted in-home user studies involving 10 families with children aged 3–5. Our data indicates that parents want to work with robots as collaborators to augment parental activities to foster children’s learning, introducing the notion of parent-robot collaboration. Our findings offer an empirical understanding of the needs and challenges of parent-child interaction in informal learning scenarios and design opportunities for integrating a companion robot into these interactions. We offer insights into how robots might be designed to facilitate parent-robot collaboration, including parenting policies, collaboration patterns, and interaction paradigms.
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Tandem: At-Home Behavior Assessment Using Multimodal Signals from the Parent-Child Dyad
The quality of parent-child interactions at an early age has been linked to children's social-emotional development, executive function, and risk for behavior problems. As such, parent-child interactions in naturalistic settings could present a unique opportunity to screen for at-risk behavior in young children, enabling timely and targeted interventions. In this work, we validate the feasibility of using structured at-home play sessions, completed via the Tandem smartphone app, to enable highly accurate and scalable behavioral assessments. We demonstrate that audio and physiological signals recorded during the play session can be used to capture key markers of parent-child interaction dynamics, which are more indicative of at-risk behavior compared to features from each individual alone. We propose novel audio-based dyadic interaction features that significantly outperform conventional speech features at predicting risk for behavior problems, achieving an F1 score of 0.87. Furthermore, we show that dyadic physiological synchrony features, extracted from privacy-preserving wearable sensor data, can classify at-risk behavior with an F1 score of 0.91. Tandem thus sets the stage for automated at-home behavior assessment tools for young children that balance screening accuracy with practical deployment considerations.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2320678
- PAR ID:
- 10660496
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2474-9567
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 25
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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