Large age differences and geographic distance between siblings can often hinder the development of close relationships, as they may have different social circles and schedules. Younger siblings may also have limited access to digital technology, which can further complicate communication and interaction between them. In this paper, we developed two technology probes, Haptic Bubble and Emoji Board. Both of these systems utilize embodied interaction, which has been shown to be an effective way to engage children in remote communication. Our work focused on three main goals through the development and preliminary study: the system design goal involved testing the feasibility of the embodied design approach, the empirical goal was to collect information on how siblings use embodied communication technology and the design goal was to inspire new kinds of technology to support large gap siblings’ needs.

Cite this work: Stuti Arora, Qiao Jin, and Svetlana Yarosh. 2023. Exploring Embodied Approaches for Large Age Gap Sibling Communication through Technology Probes. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 635–640. https://doi.org/10.1145/3585088.3593892