Play is the main occupation and a fundamental human right for children. Children need to play to develop their physical health, social skills, cognitive skills, creativity and more. Children living with disabilities can have fewer play opportunities because of the need to devote time to other therapies and the overall impact of the barriers they face. We propose that a social robot intervention can help support children living with physical disabilities to engage in play. Lab studies have demonstrated that social robots can successfully support children with disabilities to learn and engage with tasks. For example, these robots have shown they can motivate children in their therapies and help foster group interactions between children and their peers. Typically, these robots are designed alongside therapist professionals, however, we take a User-Centered approach and shift our focus on the families. We want to learn their perspective to ensure we meet people’s real-life social and pragmatic needs and constraints. In this project, we aim to learn about the primary concerns of family units or their perceived barriers to using a social robot, how families imagine using and playing with it, and the features most important to them. These results can support technologists in designing an effective social robot for facilitating play for children with physical disabilities. We approach this by conducting a workshop with family units where they will get a brief demo of available on-the-market robots and participate in exploratory creative exercises such as building or drawing a robot design.
