Hello, everyone. My name is Seungchul,
and I am happy to present our work,
Dyadic Mirror.
This work is in collaboration with KAIST,
IBM, and KOREATECH.
Every parent dreams of a happy family.
But, the reality is tough.
Let me give you an example
of a typical morning routine
of a parent and a young kid.
A parent is always busy every morning,
but the kid is not cooperating
with the parent's plan to be quick.
The kid eats slowly,
refuses to brush the teeth,
and resists going to the kindergarten.
Eventually,
the parent runs out of patience
and takes a shortcut;
expressing anger, yelling out loudly,
and forcing the kid.
At night, the parent reflects on this morning incident
and promises not to repeat it.
But it happens again and again.
What would be the key
to break this vicious circle?
We introduce Parental Reflective Functioning.
a theory in Psychology
which refers to one’s capacity
to understand mental states of self and others.
It is known that parents
with a higher level of reflective functioning
show better relationships with their child.
Parental reflective functioning has two major mechanisms;
perspective-taking and self-awareness.
However, it is extremely difficult
to practice reflective functioning
during everyday interactions with the child.
From our preliminary interview with 8 parents,
we found that there is a significant gap
between the knowledge and practice.
It turned out that
there are three main hurdles for this gap.
First, the mental and physical load of parents
is too heavy to smoothly interact with their child.
Second, conflicting situations occur
in many different real-life situations.
Third, there is no channel for the parents
to be consciously aware of their own mental status
and reflect upon their expressions
during interactions with their child.
To overcome these hurdles,
we set up three design requirements.
First, it should have no additional mental and physical effort.
Second, it should operate in general real-life situations.
Third, it should provide a direct and immediate channel
for parents to recognize the internal states
of themselves and the child.
To this end, we propose “Dyadic Mirror”,
a wearable smart mirror
comprehensively designed to facilitate
the parent’s reflective functioning
during everyday interaction at their homes.
Dyadic Mirror consists of two main hardware;
a child-worn vest,
and a tiny smartphone attached to the vest.
It automatically recognizes an event
of parent-child face-to-face interactions
by periodically detecting the parent’s face.
Once ongoing interaction is detected,
Dyadic Mirror continuously displays the tracked face
by cropping and magnifying the face
from the captured image.
Note that a wide-angle lens is attached to the camera
to increase an opportunity of detection.
Dyadic Mirror successfully facilitates
reflective functioning of parents.
Through the mirrored face,
the parent can continuously get self-awareness
by seeing herself.
At the same time,
the parent can perspective-take the child
by instantly recognizing the second-person's view.
We carefully designed, implemented,
and evaluated Dyadic Mirror,
following the three-phase study procedure.
First, we conducted a preliminary interview,
which I introduced before.
Second, we crafted a vest form factor
through multiple iterations.
We also implemented an Android application
for the second-person view.
Third, we conducted the field deployment
with 6 families for 4 weeks.
Each family used Dyadic Mirror every day at their homes.
Findings.
From the weekly interviews,
we obtained an extensive volume
of experiences and anecdotes.
We grouped them into these five main themes.
In this talk, I would like to introduce
the first three themes.
‘Surprise’ emerged in the first few days of deployment.
For parents, it was the first time
they were aware of their faces
during live interactions with their children.
They were astonished
that their faces were considerably different
from what they originally imagined.
Surprise happened in a variety of situations and reasons,
such as overreactions and false reactions.
Next, we found that the participants
could empathize with the difference in how
their children would see the participants themselves
and the surroundings in their homes.
With these visual perspectives,
the parents continued inferring
what the child would have felt
from what they saw.
Behavior change.
Over the deployment period,
the participants were proud of themselves
for improving their interaction styles.
We found that Dyadic Mirror was an effective trigger
for in-situ behavior changes.
Participants recalled that Dyadic Mirror helped them
regulate themselves before going critical
when their emotions were escalating.
We also observed early indications that
the participants could keep changing their behaviors
without Dyadic Mirror.
Our contribution is three-fold.
First, we adopt the concept
of parental reflective functioning
into the agenda of computer-supported parenting.
Second, we newly present the design
of the second-person view.
Third, from the field deployment,
we show an initial effect of our experimental design.
This is the end of the presentation.
Thank you for listening.