Quantifying Intentional Social Acceptance for Effective Child-Robot Interaction

Child-robot interaction has become an important issue as social robots are increasingly being designed for use in education, healthcare, entertainment, and other fields. Therefore, robot acceptance among children is a relevant topic, especially since most researchers define metrics and measure robot interaction primarily with adults. This has created a gap in defining metrics for measuring child-robot interaction. In response, this paper presents a protocol and results aimed at quantifying intentional social acceptance in interactions between children aged six and a social robotic platform called JARI. The study was conducted in a primary school in Madrid, Spain. The protocol established interactions in a natural setting, specifically a classroom, where children performed guided activities with the robot for 15 minutes. To asses the validity and reliability of the metric the paper presents a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and alpha coefficient analysis. The results confirm the validity of the metric, and the data indicate that children demonstrate a high intention to use the robot.