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

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.

Symbiotic Child Emotional Support with Social Robots and Temporal Knowledge Graphs

In current youth-care programs, children with needs (mental health, family issues, learning disabilities, and autism) receive support from youth and family experts as one-to-one assistance at schools or hospitals. Occasionally, social robots have featured in such settings as support roles in a one-to-one interaction with the child. In this paper, we suggest the development of a symbiotic framework for real-time Emotional Support (ES) with social robots Knowledge Graphs (KG). By augmenting a domain-specific corpus from the literature on ES for children (between the age of 8 and 12) and providing scenario-driven context including the history of events, we suggest developing an experimental knowledge-aware ES framework. The framework both guides the social robot in providing ES statements to the child and assists the expert in tracking and interpreting the child's emotional state and related events over time.