The sense of family connectedness may support positive outcomes including individual well-being, resilience, and healthy family functioning. However, as technologies advance, they often replace human-human interactions instead of nurturing them. In this work, we investigate how robot-facilitated communication tools might instead create new opportunities for family connection. We conducted two studies with families with children aged 5-12. We first explored the design space through in-home technology probe sessions with six families. These probes inspired us to explore two key interaction design dimensions: the robot's behavior strategy (passive, reactive, proactive) and the mode of communication (synchronous, asynchronous). We then conducted a laboratory study with 20 families to examine how the two dimensions shaped parent-child interaction and connection. Our findings characterize how parents and children appropriated robot-mediated exchanges, the tensions they experienced around initiative, timing, and privacy, and the opportunities they envisioned for supporting everyday connectedness.
@article{arxiv.2604.23976,
title = {Designing Robots to Support Parent-Child Connections: Opportunities Through Robot-Mediated Communication},
author = {Michael F Xu and Bengisu Cagiltay and Yaxin Hu and Anjun Zhu and Bilge Mutlu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.23976},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Proceedings of the 25th Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC '26)