Many children have imaginary friends: this is a phenomenon related to the development of social intelligence. Very young children would not understand that others might want or know something different than themselves. Wouldn’t it be nice if a child can indeed have a loyal companion that may help with their mental development? This need may be particularly strong in a pandemic when schools are closed. Moxie is a robot for 5 to 10-year-olds produced by the company Embodied. It is designed with a team of experts in neurosciences, child development, storytelling and technologies. Based on AI technologies, the robot can perceive and respond to natural conversations, eye contact, and facial expressions, as well as recognizing people, places, and things. The main purpose of Moxie is to offer personalized learnings in social, emotional and cognitive development. Through daily interactions with Moxie, children will be able to develop conversation skills, friendship skills, emotional regulation, and self-esteem, among other skills. The robot comes with a parent app and an online portal where activities can be checked and missions for children can be found. Specifically, the robot can have conversations, guide a kid to practice mindfulness (such as breathing and meditation) and have creative drawing, remind of dentist appointment and discuss it, suggest weekly missions such as talking about feelings, teach based on weekly themes such as kindness, ask the kid to read stories to the robot, and provide a child-friendly dictionary. An imaginary friend embodied it is.
Summary
Purpose
To help with children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development
Idea
Use AI to make a robotic companion
Further Possibilities
1. Build a robot helping senior people with cognitive decline
2. Build a general collection of courses or entertainment contents for all robots
3. Learn from the robot use data to study child development
4. Have a hologram instead of a physical robot for the same purpose
5. Use the robot to learn human skills for AI
Questions
1. Who might be all the people that need robotic companion?
2. What might be all the things that a robot can teach people and vice versa?
3. What might we get if we connect Internet of Things with Robots?
