• Korean Journal of Child Studies
• /
• v.29 no.5
• /
• pp.97-111
• /
• 2008

This paper presents three related experiments designed to identify factors that may affect the level of intimacy between children and a robot placed in a kindergarten setting. In total, 68 children aged three to five took part in the experiments, where they were instructed to share four or five stickers with a robot as they wished. Data were collected by means of video-taping and by interviewing the motivations of the children for their conducts in the experiment. The results of the study suggest the following factors that may affect the extent to which a child feels intimacy towards a robot: gender, age, prior experiences with a robot, interaction time with a robot, and the perception of robot appearance design.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
• /
• v.10 no.6
• /
• pp.109-118
• /
• 2020

The purpose of this research is to investigate the effects of interaction, gender, and age on preschool children's intimate relationship with entertainment robot dog. For this purpose, two kinds of experiments were conducted for 70 preschool children in day care centers in Seoul. Experiment 1 relates to the interaction with entertainment robot dog, 34 children aged 5 years (17 experimental groups, 17 comparative groups). Experiment 2 was a study on the effects of gender and age. A total of 36 children (pre- and post-group) of 12 children aged 3, 4, and 5 years old were included. This study interviewed the number of distributions and the motivations for distribution by using the "Dividing Game(Distribution Principle)" interview. As a result, firstly the group experiencing the interaction felt more intimate with the entertainment robot dog, and the reason was emotional factor the most(Experiment 1). Second, gender had no significant effect on entertainment robot dog intimacy and age showed a reverted U-shape. The above results are meaningful in that it reveals what kind of factors affecting the intimacy between the preschooler and entertainment robot dog.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
• /
• v.10 no.2
• /
• pp.61-69
• /
• 2015

In this paper, we propose and examine the feasibility of the robot-assisted behavioral intervention system so as to strengthen positive response of the children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) for learning social skills. Based on well-known behavioral treatment protocols, the robot offers therapeutic training elements of eye contact and emotion reading respectively in child-robot interaction, and it subsequently accomplishes pre-allocated meaningful acts by estimating the level of children's reactivity from reliable recognition modules, as a coping strategy. Furthermore, for the purpose of labor saving and attracting children's interest, we implemented the robotic stimulation configuration with semi-autonomous actions capable of inducing intimacy and tension to children in instructional trials. From these configurations, by evaluating the ability of recognizing human activity as well as by showing improved reactivity for social training, we verified that the proposed system has some positive effects on social development, targeted for preschoolers who have a high functioning level.