Child-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices: Recent Works, New Dataset, and Age Detection

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent child-computer interaction research with mobile devices, introduces the ChildCI framework and dataset for longitudinal studies, and demonstrates age detection from interaction data to support e-learning and health applications.

Contribution

It presents a new large-scale, publicly available dataset of children's interactions with tablets, and a framework for studying cognitive and neuromotor development over time.

Findings

ChildCIdb contains data from over 400 children aged 18 months to 8 years.

Demonstrated age detection accuracy using interaction data.

Framework supports longitudinal and multi-modal studies in child development.

Abstract

This article provides an overview of recent research in Child-Computer Interaction with mobile devices and describe our framework ChildCI intended for: i) overcoming the lack of large-scale publicly available databases in the area, ii) generating a better understanding of the cognitive and neuromotor development of children along time, contrary to most previous studies in the literature focused on a single-session acquisition, and iii) enabling new applications in e-Learning and e-Health through the acquisition of additional information such as the school grades and children's disorders, among others. Our framework includes a new mobile application, specific data acquisition protocols, and a first release of the ChildCI dataset (ChildCIdb v1), which is planned to be extended yearly to enable longitudinal studies. In our framework children interact with a tablet device, using both a pen stylus and the finger, performing different tasks that require different levels of neuromotor and cognitive skills. ChildCIdb is the first database in the literature that comprises more than 400 children from 18 months to 8 years old, considering therefore the first three development stages of the Piaget's theory. In addition, and as a demonstration of the potential of the ChildCI framework, we include experimental results for one of the many applications enabled by ChildCIdb: children age detection based on device interaction.