Social Robots to Support Child and Family Care: A Dutch Use Case

Abstract

Child and family care professionals in the Netherlands are facing challenges including high workloads. Technological support could be beneficial in this context, e.g. for education, motivation and guidance of the children. For example, the Dutch Child and Family Center explores the possibilities of social robot assistance in their regular care pathways. To study the use of social robots in this broad context, we started by drafting three example scenarios based on the expertise of child care professionals. During an exploration phase, we are identifying key design and application requirements through focus groups with child care professionals and parents. Later stages of our research, the testing phase, will focus on testing these requirements via scenario-based design and child-robot interaction experiments in real-world contexts to further shape the application of social robots in various child and family care settings.