The parent-child companion – A context-aware home exploration – Fernando Martinez, Chris Greenhalgh, Stefan Rennick Egglestone The Mixed Reality Laboratory The University of Nottingham Computer Science Building Jubilee Campus Wollaton Road Nottingham, NG8 1BB, UK {fxm, cmg, sre}@cs.nott.ac.uk INTRODUCTION For a full- or part-time carer of young children, the home can be a demanding and stressful environment. The commitment of time and effort that is necessary both to keep a child safe and to help them to develop is very significant, especially for the youngest children, and additional tasks such as housekeeping and cooking can add to this already-heavy workload. The parent-child companion is looking for designing nurturance technologies for the childcare. As a preliminary step, we have conducted a study to explore daily practices for the care of children in the home, and how this is spatially managed with the household. THE SOCIAL CONTEXT There has been some focus in ubicomp upon technologies that can be used to simplify the process of caring, for instance, situated video. However, there are situations where such caring support is far apart of the parent’s hands. For example, consider the scenario of a mother who is caring for a baby and a toddler, and who is using a video feed to monitor the baby, whilst cooking dinner using a hot oven. Even if the mother observes the baby crying, she cannot leave the toddler alone in the dangerous kitchen environment, especially if they are too young to explore near outlets, cupboards, windows etc. Instead, the mother either has to choose to finish cooking, leaving the baby crying, or to take the toddler with her to comfort the baby. With either option, one of the children is not being nurtured as well as they might be – either the baby is left in distress, or the toddler may have to be interrupted from beneficial activities that they may be enjoying. However, if technologies could be developed that help to increase the safety of the home for young children, then we believe that this could help to create an environment which might invest the carer task, and which therefore allows them to play a more nurturing role in the development of their children. Such a technology might allow different children different levels of freedom to explore and experiment with their home environment, commensurate with their knowledge of the dangers that such environments present. However the construction of a such technology presents a difficult set of challenges, including those of sensing activity in the house, inferring the type of activity that is taking place from imperfect sensor readings, establishing what activities are dangerous for young children, specifying what activities particular children are allowed to undertake, and configuring the home environment to permit only those activities that are allowed. To solve these challenges, we envision the HomeNet, a pervasive technology that enables communication between furniture, appliances and mobile technology, and which provides a parent-child companion, capable of configuring the home environment for particular children and warning parents of dangers which their children face. Figure 1 below shows a diagrammatic view of the HomeNet.