Sharing is caring: Designing a value-sensitive mhealth platform for sharing type 1 diabetes management within families

Within a mobile-technology enhanced educational framework, this study investigates needs and expectations of children (aged 8-14) with type 1 diabetes, and their parents, to define the functionalities of PAL Inform, a web-based monitoring module. The aim is to design it as a tool for parents to be informed on the educational progresses, as well on diabetes-related data, of their children without violating their values (privacy, trust, autonomy). Through a set of co-design activities, carried out with 39 children and 45 parents, it was possible to define which kind of information parents would monitor and children (especially pre-adolescents), in turn, would share, without compromising family dynamics: i.e. glycaemic values and trends, insulin doses, carbohydrates intake, generic emotional status, educational progresses on diabetes-related knowledge. Leveraging on these insights, a set of functional requirements was elicited for the future monitoring module implementation

Towards long-term social child-robot interaction: using multi-activity switching to engage young users

Social robots have the potential to provide support in a number of practical domains, such as learning and behaviour change. This potential is particularly relevant for children, who have proven receptive to interactions with social robots. To reach learning and therapeutic goals, a number of issues need to be investigated, notably the design of an effective child-robot interaction (cHRI) to ensure the child remains engaged in the relationship and that educational goals are met. Typically, current cHRI research experiments focus on a single type of interaction activity (e.g. a game). However, these can suffer from a lack of adaptation to the child, or from an increasingly repetitive nature of the activity and interaction. In this paper, we motivate and propose a practicable solution to this issue: an adaptive robot able to switch between multiple activities within single interactions. We describe a system that embodies this idea, and present a case study in which diabetic children collaboratively learn with the robot about various aspects of managing their condition. We demonstrate the ability of our system to induce a varied interaction and show the potential of this approach both as an educational tool and as a research method for long-term cHRI

Young Users’ Perception of a Social Robot Displaying Familiarity and Eliciting Disclosure

Establishing a positive relationship between a user and a system is considered important or even necessary in applications of social robots or other computational artifacts which require long-term engagement. We discuss sever- al experiments investigating the effects of specific relational verbal behaviors within the broader context of developing a social robot for long-term support of self-management improvement in children with Type 1 diabetes. Our results show that displaying familiarity with a user as well as eliciting the user’s self- disclosure in off-activity talk contribute to the user’s perception of the social robot as a friend. We also observed increased commitment to interaction suc- cess related to familiarity display and increased interest in further interactions related to off-activity talk

Towards long-term social child-robot interaction: using multi-activity switching to engage young users

Social robots have the potential to provide support in a number of practical domains, such as learning and behaviour change. This potential is particularly relevant for children, who have proven receptive to interactions with social robots. To reach learning and therapeutic goals, a number of issues need to be investigated, notably the design of an effective child-robot interaction (cHRI) to ensure the child remains engaged in the relationship and that educational goals are met. Typically, current cHRI research experiments focus on a single type of interaction activity (e.g. a game). However, these can suffer from a lack of adaptation to the child, or from an increasingly repetitive nature of the activity and interaction. In this paper, we motivate and propose a practicable solution to this issue: an adaptive robot able to switch between multiple activities within single interactions. We describe a system that embodies this idea, and present a case study in which diabetic children collaboratively learn with the robot about various aspects of managing their condition. We demonstrate the ability of our system to induce a varied interaction and show the potential of this approach both as an educational tool and as a research method for long-term cHRI.</p

Towards long-term social child-robot interaction: using multi-activity switching to engage young users

Social robots have the potential to provide support in a number of practical domains, such as learning and behaviour change. This potential is particularly relevant for children, who have proven receptive to interactions with social robots. To reach learning and therapeutic goals, a number of issues need to be investigated, notably the design of an effective child-robot interaction (cHRI) to ensure the child remains engaged in the relationship and that educational goals are met. Typically, current cHRI research experiments focus on a single type of interaction activity (e.g. a game). However, these can suffer from a lack of adaptation to the child, or from an increasingly repetitive nature of the activity and interaction. In this paper, we motivate and propose a practicable solution to this issue: an adaptive robot able to switch between multiple activities within single interactions. We describe a system that embodies this idea, and present a case study in which diabetic children collaboratively learn with the robot about various aspects of managing their condition. We demonstrate the ability of our system to induce a varied interaction and show the potential of this approach both as an educational tool and as a research method for long-term cHRI.</p