Robot-Mediated interviews with children: What do potential users think?

To date research investigating the potential of Robot-Mediated Interviews (RMI) has focused on establishing how children respond to robots in an interview scenario. In order to test if an RMI approach would work in a real world setting, it is important to establish what the experts (e.g. specialist child interviewers) would require from such a system. To determine the needs of such expert users we conducted three user panels with groups of potential real world users to gather their views of our current system and find out what they would require for the system to be useful to them. The user groups consisted of specialist police officers, intermediaries, educational specialists and healthcare specialists. To our knowledge this is the first article investigating user needs for Robot-Mediated Interviews. Due to the novelty of this area, the work presented in this paper is exploratory in nature. The results provide valuable insights into what real world users would need from a Robot-Mediated Interviewing system. Our findings will contribute to future research and technology development in the domain of RMI in particular, and child-robot interaction in general.