Hello everyone. This is Xiyue Wang from Tohoku University.
I'm proud to present AssessBlocks
exploring toy block play features
for assessing stress in young children after natural disasters.
Children's after disaster mental health has been a severe problem.
After 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami
Children have exhibited aggressive behaviors as well as anxiety and helplessness
After 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami
there was a high risk of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among children.
Meanwhile, toy blocks, as the classical toys, are accessible in children's daily life.
The physicality provides a non-verbal channel for children to express themselves.
Thus, they have been used in play therapies and development stage assessement.
We observed, after 2011 event, in the most hit area,
Children who had stressful behavior had changed their block play behavior.
For example, they are reluctant to build high structures.
It makes us to wonder, block play activities
might express their feelings of fear, greif, anger towards the disaster
and can be used for assessment.
Our goal is to assess
children's stress with automated toy blocks.
To reach that, we developed the following three steps.
First, we developed play data capturing toy block.
We then deployed them to children, evaluated their stress.
We next assessed children's stress with play features.
We developed the block in two shapes.
Each of them had embeded an IMU inside to collect motion data wirelessly during play.
We defined four play features that are fundamental and distinct to extract.
Move, Hold, Stand,and Lay.
Using a threshold-base algorithm,
we were able to compute the block features in time and count.
We also added total playtime play time and movement into our features.
We also extracted four play behaviors
which might be important
but couldn't be captured by the sensor.
Concentrated Time, Lost Time,
Stack Time, and Flat Time.
They were coded by the video-coders manually.
We recuited 52 children,
15 of them had witnessed the tsunami.
Each of them were invited to play for 20 minutes with with our blocks.
Then can end early or continue after time is up.
The target stress measurements include sAA, salivary alpha
amylase activity for psychological and physical stress.
which was measured before and after the experiment.
OSBD, observational scale of Behavioral distress,
which was measured. before, in the middle and after the play session.
First, from the pairwise correlation analysis,
we found implicit. correlation between sAA values
and OSBD values.
Since the convergence of two measurements wasn't found
We think the two stress measurements are represening differen aspects
of stress, physiological and behavioral.
To summarize the most important findings,
from pairwise correlations
we found tsunami experience was correlated
physiological stress sAA and behavioral stress OSBD
with different directions.
We found a set of constructional features
Flat Time, Stand Time, Stand Count,
are correlated to physiological stress
While the motional features,
Total time, Move time
are correlated to behavioral stress OSBD.
This showed the potentials to use our block features
as well as tsunami experience to assess
children's these two stress (measurements).
To conclude,
We designed sensors-embedded toy blocks to capture children’s action data.
We deployed them to children, collected their stress and play data.
We showed potentials to assess young children’s stress after the disaster
with our blocks.
In future, we hope to update the blocks
to capture more actions,
analyze the sequential patterns,
and predict children's mental state with AssessBlocks.
Thank you so much
and please refer to our paper for more details.