Child-Computer Interaction: Recent Works, New Dataset, and Age Detection

We overview recent research in Child-Computer Interaction and describe our framework ChildCI intended for: i) generating a better understanding of the cognitive and neuromotor development of children while interacting with mobile devices, and ii) enabling new applications in e-learning and ehealth, among others. Our framework includes a new mobile application, specific data acquisition protocols, and a first release of the ChildCI dataset (ChildCIdb v1), which is planned to be extended yearly to enable longitudinal studies. In our framework children interact with a tablet device, using both a pen stylus and the finger, performing different tasks that require different levels of neuromotor and cognitive skills. ChildCIdb comprises more than 400 children from 18 months to 8 years old, considering therefore the first three development stages of the Piaget’s theory. In addition, and as a demonstration of the potential of the ChildCI framework, we include experimental results for one of the many applications enabled by ChildCIdb: children age detection based on device interaction. Different machine learning approaches are evaluated, proposing a new set of 34 global features to automatically detect age groups, achieving accuracy results over 90% and interesting findings in terms of the type of features more useful for this task.