Engaging children in cars through a robot companion

Abstract

Having children as passengers in a car influences the parents' experience of driving. Concern for their safety often supersedes other considerations. When designing in-car solutions to address the special needs of children as passengers, one could aim for assisting the parents with this task. For such systems, it is important that the proposed solution is able to engage the children and keeps them from distracting the driver, while offering the children an interesting and meaningful way to spend their time in the car. We propose and evaluate a conceptual design that involves an interactive, full-speech companion that uses information from the drive to entertain and educate children. Our evaluation reveals that a robot companion is able to engage the children more than a similar system without a physical companion, giving them an entity to direct their interactions to. This finding makes it a worthwhile consideration for designers to add such components to their solutions.

Designing a virtual assistant for in-car child entertainment

“…Hiau et al [10] designed an in car entertainment system and found that having a physical robot companion to whom the children directed their attention proved better than a system without a physical companion. Furthermore, [2] showed that a robotic agent, used to help drivers with tasks such as managing phone and messages in a mock driving task, the robot agent helped reduce driver task load and promoted sociability better than a phone or a static agent.…”