Baby steps

Abstract

Parents of young children often want to keep a variety of records on their children"s early years, for the purposes of preservation of memories or at the request of their pediatrician. However, time constraints, motivation, and forgetfulness may hinder their ability to keep consistent records. We developed a system, Baby Steps, which is designed to improve the record-keeping process. In this paper, we present the results of a 3-month deployment study of this technology with 8 families and their pediatricians. The study showed that when compared to a control condition, experimental design features of Baby Steps encouraged parents to more frequently collect and review records, provided higher confidence in reporting, and improved parent-pediatrician communication.

Teaching and Developing Social and Emotional Skills with Technology

“…Future work looking at facilitating parents' involvement with SEL might also draw on the existing research around supporting shared play activities, for example, Raffle et al [2010]. In the scope of autism-related systems, Hong et al [2012] present another example, exploring how a social network can support a person with autism in drawing on advice, help, and interactions with an extended network of close others, rather than relying on a single primary care-giver and/or the trainer, and Kientz et al [2009] deployed a system to support tracking infants' social behaviour, supporting early detection of possibly autism-related disorders. Such systems exemplify how digital technology might be designed to promote sharing of the expert role of the SEL teacher with parents and the extended family in the home context.…”

“…In particular, a number of papers show how relevant aspects of interaction might be tracked in real time, and how providing feedback on these can positively affect an interaction. For example, DiMicco et al [2007] and Kim et al [2008] explore how increased awareness of speaking behaviour within an interaction (e.g., through a visualisation) can affect and shape group dynamics. There are also indications that even subtler elements of interpersonal interaction may be addressed.…”

“…In both cases, there is still a fixed, controlled space in which to deploy the technology and in which a teacher can lead the scaffolding to some extent, but already supporting behaviour not tied to specific exercises. Moreover, one can utilise the fact that all interactions take place on the school grounds, allowing additional technology to be deployed at strategic points (such as in a main hall, in the playground, and so on), or invite students to use a specific technology as part of their learning process (such as providing each student with a Sociometer-like badge [Kim et al 2008]). The support for embedding learned skills can also be extended to the home and other outof-school contexts in which making assumptions about the other interactants, roles, or locations is more difficult, but in which the support for reinforcement of SEL learning is even more crucial.…”

“…To our knowledge, there is only limited work in HCI so far that would explicitly aim to promote such progressive learning of skills, by a short-term scaffolding that is later taken away (see MACH [Hoque et al 2013;Pina et al 2014], or [Bouchard et al 2012] for several exceptions), as opposed to providing continuous support of specific activities (e.g., MeetingMediator [Kim et al 2008]) that may affect interaction at a particular meeting, but not necessarily lead to skills development, or long-term changes once the technology is no longer available. Further research is thus needed to understand how we can more systematically design for such "teach and disappear" technologies, implying a core quality of technologies that can be adapted in structured ways over time; this is a topic in which we could likely learn from the existing SEL knowledge, at least in terms of how the content/support focus should evolve.…”

“…Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY 10121-0701 USA, fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. c 2015 ACM 1073-0516/2015/06-ART19 $15.00 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2744195 [Coyle et al 2007], positive computing [Calvo and Peters 2014], as well as a number of individual systems aiming to affect particular social behaviour such as discussion dominance or rapport [Balaam et al 2011;Kim et al 2008]. Despite this impressive growth over recent years, the existing body of work is still in early stages, with two important limitations: First, most of the research so far is limited in scope, focusing on specific disadvantaged populations, especially the support for people with autism.…”