Modeling and assessing young children abilities and development in ambient intelligence

Abstract

This paper presents a novel framework, called Bean, which aims to monitor, evaluate and enhance pre-school children’s skills and abilities through playing in Ambient Intelligence environments. The framework includes: (i) a model of children development based on the ICF-CY model and the Denver - II assessment tool, aiming at early detection of children’s potential developmental issues to be further investigated and addressed if necessary; (ii) a reasoning mechanism for the automated extraction of child development knowledge, based on interaction monitoring, targeted to model relevant aspects of child’s developmental stage, maturity level and skills; (iii) content editing tools and reporting facilities for parents and therapists. The framework has been implemented in the context of an AmI environment for supporting children play in AmI, deploying a collection of augmented artifacts, as well as a collection of digital reproductions of popular games.