Parenting Journal · Volume 2 · Issue 5 · Licensed source edition
Children’s Imaginaries of Human-Robot Interaction in Healthcare
Originally published 2018-05-12 · International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) · DOI 10.3390/ijerph15050970 ↗
AI / system type
Programmed educational robot prototypes and imagined social robotics; no deployed generative AI
Child-facing evidenceExamines children or child-focused systems. Transfer to everyday family life must be assessed separately.
The AI connection
Children co-designed and programmed social-robot prototypes intended for future healthcare interaction.
Why this reading matters
A concrete way to invite a young child’s voice into decisions about care technology and the human relationships it should serve.
Editorial reading guide · Collaboration
What would my child want a robot to do to help people care for one another?
Children designed hospital robots through drawing, stories, role play, construction, and programming. Their designs placed robots within networks of care involving parents, siblings, clinicians, and even care for the robot itself. This illustrates the kinds of relational concerns children can contribute to design, rather than testing a therapeutic robot on hospitalized patients.
Study context
One class of 30 pupils in a middle/upper-income Barcelona school, working with teachers, roboticists, and social scientists over 12 workshops
Age / stage: Six-year-old first-graders
Read with three questions
- How did children’s prototypes connect care from people with care by or for a robot?
- Which ideas would be missed if adults asked only about a robot’s technical functions?
- How do imagined hospital scenarios differ from observing children who are actually receiving care?
Keep the limits in view
Participants were schoolchildren, not pediatric patients, and the school already offered robotics in a relatively advantaged setting. Qualitative interpretation and prospective imaginaries do not establish clinical need or benefit. LEGO/programmed prototypes represented possible social-robot roles, not validated autonomous AI caregivers.
The text below is the original article’s licensed repository edition. Its wording is not rewritten. Use the Paper Agent beside the text to locate evidence; open the source for figures, tables and complete context.
Opening the verified paper and agent…
Checking the article identity, license record, and saved source text.
Open the repository recordAttribution & reuse
Follow the original.
Original authorship, publication date, journal and DOI are preserved. This issue’s TRICK placement and reading questions are editorial additions, not claims made by the original authors.
Núria Vallès-Peris; Cecilio Angulo; Miquel Domènech (2018). Children’s Imaginaries of Human-Robot Interaction in Healthcare International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15050970
Permissions checked against the saved article notice; repository publication notices screened 2026-11-04. This is not a new peer-review decision. The source authors and publishers are not represented as endorsing this issue.