Designing Long-term Parent-child-robot Triadic Interaction at Home through Lived Technology Experiences and Interviews

Abstract

Social agents have been mostly designed to engage with children one-on-one as tutors or learning peers. Besides this child-robot dyadic interaction paradigm, they have the potential to empower parents to more actively interact with their children. Robot-assisted parent-child interaction could be a sustainable future approach for promoting children’s in-home learning. Motivated by this new design direction, this work takes an iterative design approach to explore how we design triadic interactions through "lived technology experiences" and interviews. For 3-6 weeks, we deployed and remotely teleoperated a social robot in the homes of 12 families with 3-7-year-old children to engage in a triadic story reading activity with both parent and child for six 25-min sessions. Before and after the deployment, we conducted a semi-structured interview with participants on their triadic interaction experience and desired robot design features. The results of our qualitative analysis show that social robots can improve various aspects of parent-child interaction. We propose design guidelines for robot-assisted parent-child interactions at home, the considerations of participants’ values around technology design, and promotion of their long-term lived technology experiences as critical sources for design knowledge.