Travel and separation with the parent and child can disrupt these critical routines. Remote interactions are effective for shared activities with children however children lack the attention span to sit still and just talk to a face on the screen effectively disrupting their routine [1]. Digital communication technologies are prevalent but often fail around families separated by work [3]. This means families need synchronous and asynchronous strategies for their children's bedtime routine, not just one [3]. Consistent bedtime routines have a dose-dependent positive association with children going to sleep [2]. Current video tools have high stimulation and can disrupt sleeping and lack the shared context needed for engagement with the parent [3]. Current app interfaces also ignore preschooler limitations cognitively and motor too [4]. Preschoolers also need specific audio and visual prompts as they would struggle to understand subtle screen state changes [4]. There is a gap for a calm, developmentally appropriate tool for consistent bedtime routines. The proposed solution is to develop an interactive tablet or mobile app for a remote shared reading experience. It can incorporate dialectic reading prompts inspired by Raffle, specifically PEER sequence (Prompt, Evaluate, Expand, Repeat) and CROWD prompts (Completion, Recall, Open ended, Wh-questions, Distancing (which is connecting the book to real life)) [1]. Generative AI can be used to personalise bed time stories to attempt a calming sense of presence, but it does not work as studies shown ambient sounds help more then generic stories [5]. The project would need to follow a strict adherence to Hiniker’s guidelines for preschooler touchscreen interactions [4]. Justification for this is that it integrates real time synchronisation with specific user experience for 3-7 year olds [4]. The project also balances technical low latency sync with the HCI challenge of mediated parent-child contact [3]. Along with the potential use of generative AI, this project exceeds the standard CRUD (allows the user to remove, edit view for a database) app complexity.

[1] Raffle, H., Ballagas, R., Revelle, G., et al. (2010). Family story play: Reading with young children (and Elmo) over a distance. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. 3. 1583-1592. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753563 [2] Mindell, J. A., Li, A. M., Sadeh, A., Kwon, R., & Goh, D. Y. (2015). Bedtime routines for young children: a dose-dependent association with sleep outcomes. Sleep, 38(5), 717–722. https://doi.org/10.5665/sleep.4662 [3] Yarosh, S., & Abowd, G. D. (2011). Mediated parent-child contact in work-separated families. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1185–1194. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979120 [4] Hiniker, A., Sobel, K., Suh, H., et al. (2015). Touchscreen Prompts for Preschoolers: Designing Developmentally Appropriate Techniques for Teaching Young Children to Perform Gestures. https://doi.org/10.1145/2771839.2771851