A Walk on the Child Side: Investigating Parents’ and Children’s Experience and Perspective on Mobile Technology for Outdoor Child Independent Mobility Michela Ferron Fondazione Bruno Kessler - FBK Trento, Italy ferron@fbk.eu Chiara Leonardi Fondazione Bruno Kessler - FBK Trento, Italy cleonardi@fbk.eu Paolo Massa Fondazione Bruno Kessler - FBK Trento, Italy massa@fbk.eu Gianluca Schiavo Fondazione Bruno Kessler - FBK Trento, Italy gschiavo@fbk.eu Amy L. Murphy Fondazione Bruno Kessler - FBK Trento, Italy murphy@fbk.eu Elisabetta Farella Fondazione Bruno Kessler - FBK Trento, Italy efarella@fbk.eu ABSTRACT Technology increasingly ofers parents opportunities to mon- itor children, reshaping the way control and autonomy are negotiated within families. This paper investigates the views of parents and primary school children on mobile technol- ogy designed to support child independent mobility in the context of the local walking school buses. Based on a school- year long feld study, we report fndings on children’s and parents’ experience with proximity detection devices. The results provide insights into how the parents and children accepted and socially appropriated the technology into the walking school bus activity, shedding light on the way they understand and conceptualize a technology that collects data on children’s proximity to the volunteers’ smartphone. We discuss parents’ needs and concerns around monitoring tech- nologies and the related challenges in terms of trust-control balance. These insights are elaborated to inform the future design of technology for child independent mobility. KEYWORDS Independent mobility, walking bus, children, parents, privacy, surveillance, trust. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. CHI 2019, May 4ś9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UK © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5970-2/19/05. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300827 ACM Reference Format: Michela Ferron, Chiara Leonardi, Paolo Massa, Gianluca Schiavo, Amy L. Murphy, and Elisabetta Farella. 2019. A Walk on the Child Side: Investigating Parents’ and Children’s Experience and Perspec- tive on Mobile Technology for Outdoor Child Independent Mobility. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceed- ings (CHI 2019), May 4ś9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UK. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300827 1 INTRODUCTION Children’s independent mobility has been shown to have a positive impact on their well-being and development, with both short and long term benefts arising from greater lev- els of physical activity and higher levels of sociability, re- sulting in improved confict resolution skills and mental well-being [15, 25, 28]. Despite this, growing restrictions are placed on children’s independent mobility, especially in ur- ban areas, due to parents’ feelings of insecurity and their perception of the outdoor space as dangerous for their chil- dren. One of the main motivations of parents for giving a smartphone to their children is the perception of risk and consequent need for monitoring and tracking their location and activities [1]. The age at which children receive their frst smartphone is lowering worldwide: in 2017, children owning a smartphone were 45% in US (age 10 to 12), 51% in Germany (age 6 to 13) and 72% in South Korea (age 11 to 12) [14]. Besides smartphone apps for location tracking [30], commercial wearable devices for tracking child location are also growing. This technological surveillance is often pro- moted as a responsible response to everyday risks [23]. However, research has argued that parental monitoring could change the way children relate to others and face the surrounding environment [18, 27]. For example, Rooney [27] showed that increased surveillance may hinder children’s development and experience of trust.