Let's Play: Early Explorations of Child-Caregiver Embodied Interactions

We report on the initial design steps of an audio-visual installation to be set up in a hospital guest house for children and their caregivers. The goal of the project is twofold: on one hand we aim to design a playful experience which can support children physical activity and their communication skills. On the other, we intend to develop an automated tool to assess a few basic qualities of child-caregiver interaction by interpreting users' upper-body motion. We focus on the early stages of the project, situating it in the context of a collaboration between two institutions: an HCI lab and a paediatric hospital. We describe our efforts for the identification of a suitable dyadic activity to be first analysed using motion capture techniques and later augmented with audio-visual feedback. We also outline the strategies identified for the evaluation of the automated measurements of embodied child-caregiver interactions. Finally, we present two basic prototypes developed to stimulate a hands-on debate within our research team on the project's design challenges and outcomes.