This study recruited 7 parent-child pairs as participants, with the parent acting as the legal guardian and the child (3 males, 4 females, marked as C1 to C7) aged 5 to 7 years old. The age distribution was: one 5-year-old, one 6-year-old, and five 7-year-olds. The child had a 10-minute introduction to the study, and they were instructed to freely engage with various items in the activity room, such as an iPad, a toy playset, and the robotic bookshelf. The experiment itself lasted around 45-50 minutes for each child. The diagram on the left shows the spatial settings of the experiment.
The robot was tele-operated by a researcher, ensuring adherence to the predetermined interaction flow throughout all interactions. The child-bookshelf interaction lasted for 20 minutes, followed by a five-minute break and a five-minute survey questionnaire for the child. Smileyometer and again-again table were employed to probe children’s “fun level” of reading with the bookshelf and their preference for reading with the bookshelf again. Finally, a semi-structured interview was conducted for 15 minutes to gather additional feedback from both children and parents. The experiment setup is illustrated in Figure 2. Video recordings were taken for the 20-minute child-bookshelf interaction, while audio recordings were taken for the 15-minute follow-up interview. The recordings were analyzed through interaction video analysis and grounded theory coding. Each child-parent pair received $10 worth of souvenirs as compensation.
The second video on the left shows teleoperation of this low-fidelity prototype including the remote control of the elephant trunk movement. The goal is to show some social expressiveness through the trunk movement.
Publications:
Z. Jiang, H. P. Koh, B. L. Chew, J. Chen, A. Z. H. Yee and Y. Wang, “Reading or iPad Gaming? Investigating Socially Interactive Robotic Bookshelf Proactively Engages Children in Reading Physical Books,” 2023 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), Busan, Korea, Republic of, 2023, pp. 1459-1466, doi: 10.1109/RO-MAN57019.2023.10309655.