Responsiveness towards robot-assisted interactions among pre-primary children of Indian ethnicity

B. Ashwini, Vrinda Narayan, Ananya Bhatia, Jainendra Shukla

Abstract: Today’s world is undeniably technology-driven and children are the ones who adopt technology with ease. This fact could be leveraged to design assistive technologies for children using social robots as they are observed to be efficient pedagogical agents. Robotic technology is evolving rapidly and robots are designed to play social roles in education, health care and home assistance. However, there has been limited research focusing on the use of robotic technologies for designing interactions with children in the global south, owing to which the response behaviour towards robot-assisted interventions are unknown. To address this gap, we conducted a study to understand the response behaviour of Indian children of the age 3-6 years towards robot-assisted interventions during directive tasks. Our analysis shows that the children could follow to robot’s instructions during the tasks and complete the tasks successfully. The exploratory outcomes also highlight the acceptance and benefits of using robotic assistants as a facilitator in education, cognitive therapies and healthcare.