Longitudinal Analysis and Quantitative Assessment of Child Development through Mobile Interaction

TL;DR

A novel longitudinal CCI database named ChildCIdbLong, which comprises over 600 children aged 18 months to 8 years old, acquired continuously over 4 academic years (2019-2023), and a novel quantitative metric called Test Quality (Q), designed to measure the motor and cognitive development of children through their interaction with a tablet device.

Abstract

This article provides a comprehensive overview of recent research in the area of Child-Computer Interaction (CCI). The main contributions of the present article are two-fold. First, we present a novel longitudinal CCI database named ChildCIdbLong, which comprises over 600 children aged 18 months to 8 years old, acquired continuously over 4 academic years (2019-2023). As a result, ChildCIdbLong comprises over 12K test acquisitions over a tablet device. Different tests are considered in ChildCIdbLong, requiring different touch and stylus gestures, enabling the evaluation of praxical and cognitive skills such as attentional, visuo-spatial, and executive, among others. In addition to the ChildCIdbLong database, we propose a novel quantitative metric called Test Quality (Q), designed to measure the motor and cognitive development of children through their interaction with a tablet device. In order to provide a better comprehension of the proposed Q metric, popular percentile-based growth representations are introduced for each test, providing a two-dimensional space to compare children's development with respect to the typical age skills of the population. The results achieved in the present article highlight the potential of the novel ChildCIdbLong database in conjunction with the proposed Q metric to measure the motor and cognitive development of children as they grow up. The proposed framework could be very useful as an automatic tool to support child experts (e.g., paediatricians, educators, or neurologists) for early detection of potential physical/cognitive impairments during children's development.

Figures (5)

• Figure 1: Graphical representation of the different interfaces designed in ChildCIdbLong, which comprises 6 different data acquisitions from January 2020 to October 2022. Two main acquisition blocks are considered: i) touch, and ii) stylus.
• Figure 2: Regions defined in "Test 6: Drawing Test" in order to calculate the proposed Q value. R0, R1, R2, R3, and R4 refer to the different areas of the picture highlighted in black, red, green, blue, and orange regions, respectively.
• Figure 3: Percentile-based growth representation in terms of the proposed Q metric for "Test 6: Drawing Test" of the ChildCIdbLong.
• Figure 4: Graphical representation of the Q values achieved in each of the tests and age groups considered in ChildCIdbLong. Red points refer to children with Non-Typical Development (NTD). The inner horizontal line of the box represents the median value. The lower and upper ends of the box represent the Q1 and Q3 quartiles, respectively. Whiskers represent the outliers.
• Figure 5: Examples of the evolution of the proposed Q values achieved in Test 6 for two different children: i) a TD child without apparent physical/cognitive impairment, and ii) a NTD child with special educational needs and an expressive language disorder. We also include on top/bottom of the figure the 6 graphical tree's executions, each corresponding with one acquisition in time.