Social Robot Scenarios for Real-World Child and Family Care Settings through Participatory Design

TL;DR

This paper presents a 5-year participatory design project on implementing social robots in child and family care settings in the Netherlands, emphasizing user involvement and addressing diverse needs.

Contribution

It demonstrates a bottom-up participatory design approach involving children, parents, and professionals for social robot integration in real-world care environments.

Findings

Inclusive design strategies for diverse user needs

Guidelines for participatory design in social robotics

Insights into social robot behaviors for child support

Abstract

This paper discusses a 5-year PhD project, focused upon the implementation of social robots for general child and family care settings in the Netherlands. The project is a collaboration with general Dutch family care organisations as well as specialized child mental health care organisations. The project adapts a bottom-up, participatory design approach, where end users are included in all stages of the project. End users consist of children, parents, and family care professionals, who all have different needs, regarding the social robot behaviors as well as the participatory design methods. This paper provides suggestions to deal with these differences in designing social robots for child mental support in real-world settings.