Maintaining the child-robot relationship after a significant break, such as a holiday, is an important step for developing sustainable social robots for education. We ran a four-session user study (n = 113 children) that included a nine-month break between the third and fourth session. During the study, participants practiced math with the help of a social robot math tutor. We found that social personalization is an effective strategy to better sustain the child-robot relationship than the absence of social personalization. To become reacquainted after the long break, the robot summarizes a few pieces of information it had stored about the child. This gives children a feeling of being remembered, which is a key contributor to the effectiveness of social personalization. Enabling the robot to refer to information previously shared by the child is another key contributor to social personalization. Conditional for its effectiveness, however, is that children notice these memory references. Finally, although we found that children's interest in the tutoring content is related to relationship formation, personalizing the topics did not lead to more interest in the content. It seems likely that not all of the memory information that was used to personalize the content was up-to-date or socially relevant.
The current study analyzed blogs written by four Dutch parents of children with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities, with the aim of deepening the understanding of the parents’ concerns. Thematic analysis was conducted and five main themes were identified: Dealing with uncertainties addressed the impact of unpredictability present in the everyday lives of parents, Love and loss described the complexity of concurrently cherishing the child and grieving various types of loss, Struggling with time, energy and finances detailed imbalances and struggles related to parents’ personal resources, Feeling included in communities and society specified social consequences, and Relating to professional care services reflected on stress and support associated with professional care delivery. The study findings demonstrate how care professionals should acknowledge parents’ vulnerabilities by being aware of their existential distress and empowering parents to exercise control of family thriving.
For a number of years now, NGO Milieu Centraal has been running the website www.klimaatwijsopreis.nl, which informs Dutch consumers about the climate impact of holidays and also allows them to calculate the climate impact of their own holiday. This calculator is based on, among other things, a number of calculation models and a series of emission factors for transport, accommodation, activities, and holiday types. These emission factors are subject to change and should be updated regularly. This project provides an update and substantiation of emission factors for a number of accommodation types, activities, and holiday types.Societal issueThe contribution of holidays to climate change is substantial, depending on choices regarding transport, distance, accommodation, and activities.Benefit to societywww.klimaatwijsopreis.nl informs consumers about the climate impact of holidays, so they can make more informed choices. Up to date and sound emission factors enable giving the most accurate advice.
