Designing Robots to Support Parent-Child Connections: Opportunities Through Robot-Mediated Communication
For families with children aged 5-12, this work explores design dimensions for robot-mediated communication to enhance family connectedness, though it is an exploratory study without quantitative performance metrics.
This work investigates how robot-facilitated communication tools can support parent-child connections, finding that robot behavior strategy (passive, reactive, proactive) and communication mode (synchronous, asynchronous) shape interaction and connection, with families appropriating exchanges in varied ways and highlighting tensions around initiative, timing, and privacy.
The sense of family connectedness may support positive outcomes including individual well-being, resilience, and healthy family functioning. However, as technologies advance, they often replace human-human interactions instead of nurturing them. In this work, we investigate how robot-facilitated communication tools might instead create new opportunities for family connection. We conducted two studies with families with children aged 5-12. We first explored the design space through in-home technology probe sessions with six families. These probes inspired us to explore two key interaction design dimensions: the robot's behavior strategy (passive, reactive, proactive) and the mode of communication (synchronous, asynchronous). We then conducted a laboratory study with 20 families to examine how the two dimensions shaped parent-child interaction and connection. Our findings characterize how parents and children appropriated robot-mediated exchanges, the tensions they experienced around initiative, timing, and privacy, and the opportunities they envisioned for supporting everyday connectedness.