A Walk on the Child Side: Investigating Parents’ and Children’s Experience and Perspective on Mobile Technology for Outdoor Child Independent Mobility

This article summarizes a paper authored by Michela Ferron, Chiara Leonardi, Paolo Massa, Gianluca Schiavo, Amy L. Murphy, and Elisabetta Farella. This paper will be presented at CHI 2019, a conference of Human-Computer Interaction, on Thursday 9th May 2019 at 14:00 in the session Access for Families Across Context.

Mom1: “Our mothers were less anxious than we are.”
Mom2: “It’s the perception of danger that has changed.”
Mom3: “Yes, but someone made us anxious, we weren’t born this way.”

These mothers of elementary age children gathered in Trento, Italy in May 2018 as part of a focus group to talk about the interplay between monitoring and trusting children. Their informal observations match those of researchers: a shift from unsupervised play to supervised activities as part of “responsible parenting”. This follows an analogous shift in cultural attitudes toward over-protection, resulting in risk-free environments that offer few opportunities for children to safely experiment with autonomy.

Technology naturally fits itself into this setting, soothing parents’ fears by offering remote surveillance (e.g., GPS tracking) that reduces uncertainty when children are not under direct supervision. Nevertheless, such technology is at risk of replacing trust relationships and preventing children from reaping the benefits that age-appropriate independence provides to their physical, social and psychological well-being.

The Smart Pedibus

Our investigation begins with the Smart Pedibus, a project inside our living lab on child independent mobility. Pedibus is Italian for Walking bus, and it describes a setting in which adult volunteers escort a group of children to school in much the same way as a school bus, but on foot. Our “Smart” Pedibus combines a proximity detection device using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology given to each child and an app on the volunteer’s smartphone that detects the BLE devices and registers the child’s presence in the walking bus.

Field study

As of 2019, nearly 400 children and 200 volunteers have participated in our Smart Pedibus initiatives. We carried out field observations, semi-structured interviews and workshops with around 60 children, their parents and Smart Pedibus volunteers, to investigate interaction patterns with technology and parents’ attitudes toward monitoring and autonomy of children.

Observations on technology use:

• Disappearing technology supports social interaction: The BLE devices were designed to be simple: no buttons, no lights, long battery life. As such, they quickly became invisible, “disappearing” inside backpacks. One parent remarked on the benefits: “(my son) completely forgot about it… and that’s right, I like it. He never touches it, he never interacts with it”. This allows the focus to remain on the positive, social benefits of the walking bus.
• Semi-visible technology can still distract: The main feature of the smartphone app is to automatically register the presence of kids. Children liked the idea of helping volunteers, and especially wanted to see if the smartphone detected their arrival. One mother noted: “Children are attracted and want to participate actively as main characters. Those [children], who are very interested in technology, help in checking, in verifying … they ask ’where am I? Am I in there?”. As such, the volunteers must actively work to keep the phones SEMI-visible and not allow them to interfere.

Observations on balancing surveillance and trust:

• Parents struggle to find balance: Parents frequently reflect on the importance of carefully balancing the needs of both parents and children. The need to protect children and, at the same time, the will to gradually let them experiment with autonomy was considered one of their main responsibilities as parents.
• Designing for Surveillance and Trust: Given the experience and observations inside the protected walking bus environment, the parents we spoke with were proactive in helping to outline a new proximity-based system that unobtrusively monitors, falling between GPS tracking and unsupervised mobility, supporting a parenting style based on trust to promote age-appropriate independent mobility in today’s society.

For more details, please read our paper or come see our presentation at CHI 2019. If you have questions or comments about this study, email Michela Ferron at ferron [at] fbk [dot] eu.

Full citation: Michela Ferron, Chiara Leonardi, Paolo Massa, Gianluca Schiavo, Amy L. Murphy, and Elisabetta Farella. 2019. A Walk on the Child Side: Investigating Parents’ and Children’s Experience and Perspective on Mobile Technology for Outdoor Child Independent Mobility. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UK. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages.