Children development tracking through parent intervention with mobile system

Abstract

Continuous tracking young children’s development is important for parents because early detection of developmental delay can lead to better treatment through early intervention. Screening tests, often based on questions answered by a parent, are used to assess children’s development, but responses from only one parent can be subjective and even inaccurate due to limited memory and observations. I propose a collaborative child development tracking system, where screening test responses are collected through collaboration between parents or caregivers.

In addition, the parents’ balanced participation in childcare is important for a child’s intellectual and emotional growth. In many countries, however, there are many families where one parent is the primary caregiver and the other is just a bystander in terms of caring for their baby because of the latter’s ignorance in and indifference to childcare as well as work exhaustion. I present a prototype called “PlayBetter”, an application that can help childcare bystander parents easily play with their baby. Based on the results of the preliminary study, two modes were designed to motivate parents to play with their baby, and to support their efforts to do so.

Also, parent-training is commonly used to support intervention of children with language delay. Unfortunately, parents find it difficult to apply the training to their child in everyday life and often give up on their parent-child interaction. I propose and evaluate TalkLIME – a mobile system that provides real-time feedback to improve the parent-child interaction and reinforce parent-training intervention. I first conducted a survey to understand parents’ feedback preference for the mobile system and determine that a non-invasive feedback using the mobile phone’s screen is preferable. TalkLIME was developed to provide real-time feedback through the mobile phone screen while also providing motivation to the parents to consistently continue parent-child interaction through both short-term and long-term goals.

Finally, mothers with newborn children sometimes perceive severe postpartum stress that negatively affects them and their entire family. In such situations, support from her husband is an important factor in the mother’s recovery process. However, working fathers in single-income families tend to underestimate the childcare difficulties of their wives. In addition, fathers often show more interest in their babies and overlook the burden on their wives which might even lead their wives to postpartum depression. I propose a novel approach to reduce maternal parenting stress by facilitating spousal communication. We implemented MomiCon, a mobile system that shares a mother’s stress level, her childcare activities, and her baby’s status with working fathers.

In this dissertation, I proposed methods to track or encourage children development by using diverse qualitative approaches such as interviews and online questionnaires for the group including development experts, parents who are raising infants. Based on preliminary results, I developed mobile systems for supporting parents in those situations, conducted user-study in the wild, and proved the effectiveness of the proposed mobile systems through qualitative and quantitative analysis.