Symbiotic Child Emotional Support with Social Robots and Temporal Knowledge Graphs
This addresses the need for improved emotional support for children aged 8-12 in youth-care settings, though it appears incremental by building on existing social robot and knowledge graph approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of providing real-time emotional support to children with mental health, family issues, learning disabilities, or autism by proposing a symbiotic framework that integrates social robots with temporal knowledge graphs. The result is a system that guides the robot in delivering emotional support statements and helps experts track and interpret the child's emotional state and events over time.
In current youth-care programs, children with needs (mental health, family issues, learning disabilities, and autism) receive support from youth and family experts as one-to-one assistance at schools or hospitals. Occasionally, social robots have featured in such settings as support roles in a one-to-one interaction with the child. In this paper, we suggest the development of a symbiotic framework for real-time Emotional Support (ES) with social robots Knowledge Graphs (KG). By augmenting a domain-specific corpus from the literature on ES for children (between the age of 8 and 12) and providing scenario-driven context including the history of events, we suggest developing an experimental knowledge-aware ES framework. The framework both guides the social robot in providing ES statements to the child and assists the expert in tracking and interpreting the child's emotional state and related events over time.