Designing Robots to Support Parent-Child Connections: Opportunities Through Robot-Mediated Communication

TL;DR

This paper explores how robot-mediated communication can enhance family connectedness, examining design dimensions and user interactions through studies with families, highlighting opportunities and challenges in fostering parent-child bonds.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework for robot-facilitated family communication, analyzing interaction strategies and user experiences to support everyday connectedness.

Findings

Families appropriated robot-mediated exchanges in diverse ways.

Tensions around initiative, timing, and privacy were identified.

Opportunities for supporting family connectedness through robots were highlighted.

Abstract

The sense of family connectedness may support positive outcomes including individual well-being, resilience, and healthy family functioning. However, as technologies advance, they often replace human-human interactions instead of nurturing them. In this work, we investigate how robot-facilitated communication tools might instead create new opportunities for family connection. We conducted two studies with families with children aged 5-12. We first explored the design space through in-home technology probe sessions with six families. These probes inspired us to explore two key interaction design dimensions: the robot's behavior strategy (passive, reactive, proactive) and the mode of communication (synchronous, asynchronous). We then conducted a laboratory study with 20 families to examine how the two dimensions shaped parent-child interaction and connection. Our findings characterize how parents and children appropriated robot-mediated exchanges, the tensions they experienced around initiative, timing, and privacy, and the opportunities they envisioned for supporting everyday connectedness.