Designing toys with automatic play characterization for supporting the assessment of a child's development
Tracy L. Westeyn, Julie A. Kientz, Thad E. Starner, Gregory D. Abowd · 2008
In this paper, we describe the design considerations and implementation of the Child'sPlay system, a technology for supporting the automatic recording, recognition, and quantification of a child's object play behaviors for retrospective analysis. Our prototype system consists of six varieties of toys augmented with wireless sensing capabilities and a mobile computing platform which uses statistical pattern recognition techniques to automatically classify sensed play behaviors. This paper discusses our choices in toy design both in form factor as well as sensing capabilities. In addition, we also describe the play activities the system supports and provide an overview of our initial recognition algorithms.