Supporting Family-School Partnerships with Robot-Facilitated Home-Based Activities

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.

Missing significant amounts of school during K-12 education is known to put students' cognitive and social development at risk. Alternatives such as home instruction and online learning are common, but lack sufficient interaction with peers and teachers in the classroom. Mobile remote presence systems, or telepresence robots, are promising for homebound students because they provide embodiment and mobility in addition to the real-time participation offered by video conferencing technologies. Research is needed, however, for telepresence robots to meet the complex needs of homebound students participating remotely in the K-12 classroom context. We present findings from four multi-week deployments with homebound K-12 students attending classes via telepresence robots. The homebound students' experiences were documented in a total of 15 interviews and analyzed qualitatively as case studies. The homebound student participants and their deployment contexts differed from one another along multiple dimensions, and while some benefits of mobile remote attendance were enjoyed by all participants, each participant also experienced unique benefits. Some challenges with hearing, seeing, and moving the robot around the classroom warranted improvements to the design of the telepresence system. Other challenges suggested priorities for managing a classroom deployment, such as ensuring that the remote student is included in classroom activities, accountable to the teacher, and treated with respect by classmates. Based on insights from the study, we make recommendations for real-world deployment procedures in similar contexts.

Assessing children's wellbeing and mental health can be particularly challenging for children experiencing communication barriers, such as children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and children with forced migration backgrounds. During the assessment process, traditional self-report questionnaires place substantial demands on language comprehension and verbal expression. In this context, social robots have emerged as a promising tool for supporting wellbeing assessment without solely relying on self-report questionnaires, yet limited research has examined how such interactions can be designed to be inclusive, appropriate, and ethically acceptable for children with diverse communication needs. To address this gap, we created candidate child--robot interaction activities as design probes and conducted focus groups with parents and professionals supporting children with DLD and children with forced migration backgrounds. Through thematic analysis, we identified considerations relating to robot role and capabilities, interactional dynamics, individual differences, and child agency, alongside population-specific considerations shaped by children's communication needs and lived experiences. Based on these findings, we derive a set of ethical and inclusive design recommendations for robot-mediated wellbeing assessment. By foregrounding these considerations and recommendations, this work contributes design guidance for inclusive robot-mediated wellbeing assessments for children with diverse communication needs.