Designing an Interactive System for Early Social Learning: Leveraging Emotion Recognition and Real-time Feedback to Foster Early Childhood Emotional Mirroring and Social Skill Development

For young children, traditional educational methods often rely too heavily on the caregiver's own time and energy as well as social attributes. There is currently no product on the market that mirrors emotions and provides real-time feedback on personality drawings that can simultaneously stimulate young children's recognition of facial emotions, understand and mimic expressions, and promote their social development. The purpose of this thesis is to design an interactive system to enhance early social learning in young children through emotion recognition and real-time feedback. The system utilizes a digital device's camera for emotion detection to detect children's facial expressions. It also promotes child engagement by integrating interactive visual and auditory cues and providing real-time feedback to help toddlers recognize emotions, mimic expressions, and promote social skills. This study combines developmental psychology with multimedia devices to provide insight into how young children use digital devices to recognize and imitate expressions, accelerate social and emotional milestones, and explore the developmental potential of providing age-appropriate, interactively designed systems for the early childhood years.