A tangible, toy-based platform to evaluate the child's social interaction in turn-taking game: a prospective on monitoring neurodevelopmental disorders

This paper describes a tangible, interactive platform presented here as an early prototype, designed to evaluate the child's social interaction with the caregiver, during play activities based on turn-taking rules. The platform is composed by 2 elements, each one providing relevant behavioural data: (a) an interactive soft toy, called Octopus X-8, able to discriminate between 2 users and to respond accordingly, by emitting rewarding sensory feedback when the game rules are observed: this toy provides data about the turn-taking interaction (e.g. users' observance of the turn, timing of rewards, sensors activity); (b) a pair of smart glasses worn by the caregiver, which provides an AI-based evaluation of the eye contact with the child. At the end of the play session, the data from the 2 sources are merged, so as to produce an overall, objective evaluation of the social interaction between the two users. A pilot study, involving a child undergoing neuropsychological assessment, shows how collected data are coherent with the video recording of the experimental session. We then propose the platform as a potential tool to monitor the behaviour of children with neurodevelopmental disorders.