MindfulNest: Strengthening Emotion Regulation with Tangible User Interfaces

Abstract

Child care programs provide an environment for children to develop their social and emotional skills. To provide additional support for teachers in nurturing this development, we created MindfulNest, a technology tool designed to support 3 to 5 year olds' development of emotion regulation strategies. We evaluated MindfulNest through a year-long test. We found that students of all ages did not associate particular emotion regulation skills with specific emotions. Younger students struggled to understand complex interactions and occasionally struggled to use the interface, however they were still able to use MindfulNest to regulate their emotions when guided by their teacher. Older students did not struggle to use MindfulNest or understand complex interactions and were able to successfully regulate their emotions by themselves and with teacher guidance.

Contact Resistance Sensing for Touch and Squeeze Interactions

“…Regarding application, recently, some studies have investigated squeezable devices for emotion regulation [18,19] and pain communication [21]. Furthermore, squeezing a stress ball is proven to be effective in regulating stress and anxiety [61,62].…”

“…Soft interfaces are regarded as more natural and expressive [1]. Researchers have explored the potential of soft interfaces in various domains, such as music instruments [2][3][4][5][6], breathing sensors [7], modeling tools [8][9][10][11], toys [12,13], controllers [11][12][13][14][15][16][17], mental health [18][19][20], communication [21,22], furniture [13,23], and robot skin [24]. These interfaces come in different sizes, ranging from finger interaction [14,15,25] to hand interaction [16,24,26] to whole body interactions [13,27].…”

12 Ways to Empower: Designing for Children’s Digital Autonomy

“…An example is Hou et al's work [76] on supporting children's online identity in international communities. Another paper [130] explored supporting children to be aware of their own emotional states when interacting with online content, thus reflect on their self identity online.…”