Social Robots to Encourage Play for Children with Disabilities: Learning Perceived Requirements

Abstract

We are currently conducting a study with children and their family units to learn the requirements for, concerns about, barriers to, and opinions on using social robots to facilitate play in children with physical disabilities. The motivation for this work is that children with disabilities often have fewer opportunities and lower playfulness, impacting their cognitive and social development. Simultaneously, social robots provide opportunities for supporting these children to engage in play. To work toward developing these robots, our goal in this work is to improve our understanding of the fundamental needs of the child and their family unit to allow us to be better positioned to develop such a social robot.

Video

Citation

Raquel Thiessen, Minoo Dabiri, Denise Y. Geiskkovitch, Jacquie Ripat, and James Everett Young. 2023. Social Robots to Encourage Play for Children with Disabilities: Learning Perceived Requirements and Barriers from Family Units. In Companion of the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 625–628. https://doi-org.uml.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/3568294.3580161

Bibtext Entry

@inproceedings{10.1145/3568294.3580161,
author = {Thiessen, Raquel and Dabiri, Minoo and Geiskkovitch, Denise Y. and Ripat, Jacquie and Young, James Everett},
title = {Social Robots to Encourage Play for Children with Disabilities: Learning Perceived Requirements and Barriers from Family Units},
year = {2023},
isbn = {9781450399708},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi-org.uml.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/3568294.3580161},
doi = {10.1145/3568294.3580161},
abstract = {We are currently conducting a study with children and their family units to learn the requirements for, concerns about, barriers to, and opinions on using social robots to facilitate play in children with physical disabilities. The motivation for this work is that children with disabilities often have fewer opportunities and lower playfulness, impacting their cognitive and social development. Simultaneously, social robots provide opportunities for supporting these children to engage in play. To work toward developing these robots, our goal in this work is to improve our understanding of the fundamental needs of the child and their family unit to allow us to be better positioned to develop such a social robot.},
booktitle = {Companion of the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction},
pages = {625–628},
numpages = {4},
keywords = {child-robot interaction, human-robot interaction, children with physical disabilities, participatory design, play and playthings},
location = {Stockholm, Sweden},
series = {HRI '23}
}