Abstract
Haru4Kids (H4K) is an app-based robot designed to co-habitate with children in their home. Seven families interacted with H4K for about two weeks each, and expressed their general feedback on the platform and their preferred activities with it, as well as their comfort levels with keeping H4K in different spaces of the home. Pre- and Post- interviews with at least one parent and all participating children allowed us to gauge familial comfort with sharing different kinds of information with the platform, and to assess how their experiences living with the robot changed their comfort levels. Children’s most preferred robot jokes and requested more diverse educational and entertainment activities. Their comfort sharing information changed after cohabitation, though they were most risk averse to sharing their conversations with others and information generally with teachers and robot creators. Parents also thought children would be more open to sharing with the robot than children actually were. Our work suggests co-habitation robots need to incorporate rich narrative-based activities and a wide variety of content to keep children’s attention over time. Child-centered, robotic design must incorporate children’s feedback, as parents may not be aware of children’s preferences.
This work has been supported by Honda Research Institute.
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Acknowledgment
We would like to thank all the participating families and Sol Benitez Casaccia for helping with the translations throughout the process. Authors thank the following persons for their technical essential contributions: Marta López, Ricardo Durán, Iván Delgado, José Andrés Millán, and Douwe Gelling. We would also like to thank Honda Research Institute for supporting this initiative.
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Levinson, L. et al. (2022). Living with Haru4Kids: Child and Parent Perceptions of a Co-Habitation Robot for Children. In: Cavallo, F., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13818. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24670-8_6
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