Designing Long-term Parent-child-robot Triadic Interaction at Home through Lived Technology Experiences and Interviews
Abstract
Social agents have been mostly designed to engage with children one-on-one as tutors or learning peers. Besides this child-robot dyadic interaction paradigm, they have the potential to empower parents to more actively interact with their children. Robot-assisted parent-child interaction could be a sustainable future approach for promoting children’s in-home learning. Motivated by this new design direction, this work takes an iterative design approach to explore how we design triadic interactions through "lived technology experiences" and interviews. For 3-6 weeks, we deployed and remotely teleoperated a social robot in the homes of 12 families with 3-7-year-old children to engage in a triadic story reading activity with both parent and child for six 25-min sessions. Before and after the deployment, we conducted a semi-structured interview with participants on their triadic interaction experience and desired robot design features. The results of our qualitative analysis show that social robots can improve various aspects of parent-child interaction. We propose design guidelines for robot-assisted parent-child interactions at home, the considerations of participants’ values around technology design, and promotion of their long-term lived technology experiences as critical sources for design knowledge.
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Social robots enhanced parent-child co-reading activities.
“Similarly, Chen et al. [7] found that social robots enhanced parent-child co-reading activities”
From SET-PAiREd: Designing for Parental Involvement in Learning with an AI-Assisted Educational Robot (2025) · cites this paper as [7]
Social companion robots have proven potential to assist parents in home education settings through studies in parent-child-robot interactions.
“Social companion robots have proven potential to assist parents in home education settings through studies in parent-child-robot interactions.”
From SET-PAiREd: Designing for Parental Involvement in Learning with an AI-Assisted Educational Robot (2025) · cites this paper as [7]
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- Authors
- Chen, H., Ostrowski, A. K., Jung Jang, S., Breazeal, C., & Park, H. W.
- Affiliations
- MIT Media Lab (US)
- MIT Media Lab,Personal Robots Group,Cambridge,MA,USA
- Venue
- 2022 31st IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2022-08-29
- Pages
- 401-408
- ISSN
- 1944-9437 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4298128210
- Cited by
- 27
- References
- 36
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 3
- FWCI
- 8.19
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- IEEE RO-MAN (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Social Sciences › Education › Child Development and Digital Technology
- Keywords
- triadic interaction, parent-child interaction, social robots, robot-assisted learning, story reading, teleoperation, design guidelines, iterative design, early childhood
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