Living with Haru4Kids: Study on children’s activity and engagement in a family-robot cohabitation scenario

摘要

Haru4Kids (H4K) is a system that emulates the physical, social, family-oriented robot Haru, designed with the goal to cohabitate with children in their home for extended periods of time. Seven families kept H4K for two net weeks in their homes. Throughout this period of cohabitation, we collected user logs comprised of the children users ’ head angles, the rotation angles of the platform, and the actions taken by H4K as well as captured images which were afterwards hand-annotated to estimate user engagement. We report the trends of these external metrics that we collected during every session of interaction. We also developed an annotation tool and report the Engagement Level Metric we chose to estimate child engagement throughout interactions “in-the-wild.” Overall, our platform offers a feasible system that can engage with children while also allowing us to monitor their engagement and behaviour throughout each interaction.