The workshop aims to bring together new interdisciplinary approaches to socio-emotional learning, exploring how interactive artifacts offer the possibility of translating emotions into tangible and physical experiences. By engaging participants in project-based prototyping activities, the workshop will investigate how tangible artifacts can foster interdisciplinary discussion, as well as define concrete principles to transform personal emotions into accessible and shared experiences.

Rett Syndrome is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder associated with severe intellectual and motor impairments. Among its core symptoms, children with Rett progressively lose purposeful hand use, limiting their ability to reach for, touch, and manipulate objects in the surrounding environment. Early intervention is therefore important to help maintain opportunities for functional hand use through repeated and motivating activities. To support this goal, we developed Pufff, a touch-sensitive interactive toy that provides visual feedback during touch-based interaction. Using signals acquired from a six-patch capacitive sensing array and a lightweight machine learning model, the system distinguishes three types of touch and triggers different responses accordingly. This interaction paradigm is intended to support future therapist-led activities aimed at encouraging purposeful hand use through play, while also enabling basic monitoring of touch interaction patterns. This paper presents an early implementation of the toy and demonstrates the technical feasibility of the approach.

Figure 1: A screenshot of the turn-taking play using the interactive soft toy Octopus X-8.The data collected by the toy, combined with the data collected by the smart glasses worn by the therapist for eye contact detection, provide an objective evaluation of the child's social interaction with the caregiver during the play activities (child's face is shown with parental consent).

In this paper, we provide an in-depth description of Echo, an interactive, smart toy, designed to encourage the symbolic play in autistic children. Symbolic play is a key competence in the cognitive development, and it is observed for instance when a child uses an object to represent other objects. The toy, characterised by an abstract shape, can autonomously recognise how the user handles it during play (e.g. mimicking the movements of a car, an aeroplane, a frog in this study) and produce, as rewarding feedback, distinctive sensory outputs such as colours and sounds, according to the detected imaginary toy. The categorisation, achieved with an average accuracy of 90.1%, is carried out in real-time by a Machine Learning (ML) model, which runs in the device's embedded electronics; the ML model was trained using the data by an onboard IMU sensor, which provides information about the toy movements (i.e. tilt, angular velocity, acceleration). The paper provides an overview of the toy design and functionalities, and presents the results of a feasibility test with neurotypical adult participants. Finally, it proposes Echo as a potential tool to encourage, through the AI-mediated sensory feedback, this pivotal competence; symbolic play is in fact often impaired or atypical in autistic children, and new technologies – such as Echo – can provide interesting novel opportunities for neurodevelopmental therapists and researchers.

Emotion-Lab is a novel educational model for the development of Emotional Intelligence in children. It is based on the use of innovative, interactive smart toys, called Transitional Wearable Companions (TWCs), originally designed to stimulate social engagement in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), through sensory-motor play with the therapist. In this work the TWCs are used in a new, educational scenario addressed to typically developed children. In a pilot test, teachers and pedagogists used the interactive features of TWCs to set up learning activities which aim to develop and improve emotional awareness and emotional competence, fundamental skills in a child’s cognitive development. In more detail the Emotion-Lab, through inclusive, social activities, aims to encourage participants to (a) become more aware of their emotional states; (b) learn to distinguish and understand the emotions of others; (c) express their own emotions appropriately; (d) experience empathic and sympathetic involvement; (e) distinguish between manifest emotional states and actual internal states. At the end of the test, children were then encouraged, through discussion, to share their intra and interpersonal experiences, with the main objective of improving mutual understanding and increasing social cohesion and, at the same time, reducing the phenomena of social discomfort, bullying, and cyberbullying.

This paper describes a tangible, interactive platform presented here as an early prototype, designed to evaluate the child’s social interaction with the caregiver, during play activities based on turn-taking rules. The platform is composed by 2 elements, each one providing relevant behavioural data: (a) an interactive soft toy, called Octopus X-8, able to discriminate between 2 users and to respond accordingly, by emitting rewarding sensory feedback when the game rules are observed: this toy provides data about the turn-taking interaction (e.g. users’ observance of the turn, timing of rewards, sensors activity); (b) a pair of smart glasses worn by the caregiver, which provides an AI-based evaluation of the eye contact with the child. At the end of the play session, the data from the 2 sources are merged, so as to produce an overall, objective evaluation of the social interaction between the two users. A pilot study, involving a child undergoing neuropsychological assessment, shows how collected data are coherent with the video recording of the experimental session. We then propose the platform as a potential tool to monitor the behaviour of children with neurodevelopmental disorders.

This paper presents the preliminary results where an experimental prototype, the interactive soft toy called Octopus X-8, is used with three children with neurodevelopmental disorders in play activities involving turn-taking. This competence is fundamental for regulating social interactions and it is often impaired in those types of disorders. The pilot experiment aims to investigate if X-8 can be used as an engaging toy usable to train turn-taking skills. The toy is able to distinguish between two users and can therefore produce rewarding sensory feedback, such as coloured lights and sounds, when the turn-taking rules are respected. Preliminary results seem to show that X-8 can indeed be used as a supporting tool to improve this important social competence.

In this workshop we will present, through live demos, novel technological tools such as interactive "smart" toys for social play and AI-based monitoring tools, developed to support the early treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). We will discuss the potential of such devices, describing also our promising results with ASD children. The goal of the workshop is to involve the specialist audience in the co-design of some potential aspects of the overall system. In particular, we are interested in collecting feedback and proposals on possible further uses of the system such as additional play activities to stimulate social behaviour; improvements of the monitoring tools; potential use of the tools in developmental disorders other than ASD.

As human beings, we are designed to be empathic, to connect emotionally with each other and to share affection. This is part of our nature and makes us feel like part of a group. New forms of technology enable us to share, in real time, a variety of data. Some data, such as those on heart rate, can relate to our affective state. This research focuses on asking if technology-mediated interactions might help us to feel more emotionally engaged and intimately connected, especially when sensorial feedback about our inner state is provided. In this context, we present an interactive device that provides two users, through pulsing lights, with feedback on their heartbeats and the related level of synchrony (fig. 1). The prototype could be used to assess the effectiveness of this technology and to improve the feeling of connectedness and intimacy between two users.

Transitional Wearable Companion (TWC) is a novel design concept, implemented as an interactive, smart, soft toy, which aims to stimulate curiosity and encourage social engagement in kids with special needs, during play activities with their caregivers. We propose the TWC as a potential support tool for neurodevelopmental therapists, during early intervention in disorders characterised by impairment in the social area, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The TWC might be helpful to set up sensory-motor games, conceived for encouraging and reinforcing critical social competences, pivotal for cognitive development, such as eye-contact, imitation, joint-attention and turn-taking. In this work, we present two working prototypes of TWC called PlusMe and X-8, currently used in pilot experiments with children diagnosed with ASD.