Emotion Buddy: Early Childhood Domestic Robot to Facilitate Emotion Regulation Learning

Social robots have the potential to support children's emotion regulation development, especially during early childhood, where emotion regulation skills enhance social and academic development. However, existing robots are not designed specifically to support young children's long-term development of emotion regulation skills in domestic settings. We introduce a prototype of Emotion Buddy — a child-led, parent-supported robot designed for routine, at-home use by children ages 2 to 6. The robot emulates 6 emotions via sound, haptics, and shape transformation based on real-time sensing of sound, movement, and touch. We intend for children to interact with the robot as part of their daily routine to identify and respond to its emulated emotions, thereby providing frequent opportunities to practice their emotion regulation skills. We discuss our design process, the current prototype, and future work to evaluate the robot's efficacy in sustained emotion regulation learning.