Glanceable and Informative WearOS User Interface for Kids and Parents

Abstract

This paper proposes a wearable user interface intended for kids and parents using WearOS smartwatches. We first review what constitutes a kids smartwatch and then design UI components for watchfaces to be used by kids and parents. Different UI components ranging from activity, education, voice search, app usage, video, location, health, and quick dial are described. These components are either implemented as complications or on watchfaces and may require on-device standalone function, cross-device communication, and external database. We introduce a theme-based amusing UI for kids whereas simple and easily accessible components are recommended to parents' watchface. To illustrate use cases, we present 3 scenarios for enhancing communication between parents and child. To show feasibility and potential of our approach, we implement our proof-of-concept using commercial smartwatches, smartphones, and external cloud database. Furthermore, performance of checking app usages on different devices are presented, followed by discussion on limitations and future work.