Co-designing a Child-Robot Relational Norm Intervention to Regulate Children's Handwriting Posture

Abstract

Persuasive social robots employ their social influence to modulate children’s behaviours in child-robot interaction. In this work, we introduce the Child-Robot Relational Norm Intervention (CRNI) model, leveraging the passive role of social robots and children’s reluctance to inconvenience others to influence children’s behaviours. Unlike traditional persuasive strategies that employ robots in active roles, CRNI utilizes an indirect approach by generating a disturbance for the robot in response to improper child behaviours, thereby motivating behaviour change through the avoidance of norm violations. The feasibility of CRNI is explored with a focus on improving children’s handwriting posture. To this end, as a preliminary work, we conducted two participatory design workshops with 12 children and 1 teacher to identify effective disturbances that can promote posture correction.