Co-designing a Child-Robot Relational Norm Intervention to Regulate Children's Handwriting Posture

TL;DR

This paper introduces the CRNI model, a passive, indirect child-robot interaction strategy that uses disturbances to influence children's handwriting posture, demonstrated through participatory design workshops.

Contribution

It presents a novel passive intervention approach for child-robot interaction, focusing on indirect influence via disturbances to promote behavior change.

Findings

Participatory workshops identified effective disturbances for posture correction.

CRNI leverages children's reluctance to inconvenience others to motivate behavior change.

Preliminary results support the feasibility of the passive intervention approach.

Abstract

Persuasive social robots employ their social influence to modulate children's behaviours in child-robot interaction. In this work, we introduce the Child-Robot Relational Norm Intervention (CRNI) model, leveraging the passive role of social robots and children's reluctance to inconvenience others to influence children's behaviours. Unlike traditional persuasive strategies that employ robots in active roles, CRNI utilizes an indirect approach by generating a disturbance for the robot in response to improper child behaviours, thereby motivating behaviour change through the avoidance of norm violations. The feasibility of CRNI is explored with a focus on improving children's handwriting posture. To this end, as a preliminary work, we conducted two participatory design workshops with 12 children and 1 teacher to identify effective disturbances that can promote posture correction.