Children acquire language by interacting with their surroundings. Due to the different language environments each child is exposed to, the words they encounter and need in their life vary. Despite the standard tools for assessment and intervention as per predefined vocabulary sets, speech-language pathologists and parents struggle with the absence of systematic tools for child-specific custom vocabulary, i.e., out-of-standard but personally more important. We propose “Open Sesame? Open Salami! (OSOS)”, a personalized vocabulary assessment and intervention system with pervasive language profiling and targeted storybook generation, collaboratively developed with speech-language pathologists. Melded into a child’s daily life and powered by large language models (LLM), OSOS profiles the child’s language environment, extracts priority words therein, and generates bespoke storybooks naturally incorporating those words. We evaluated OSOS through 4-week-long deployments to 9 families. We report their experiences with OSOS, and its implications in supporting personalization outside standards.

Continuous tracking young children's development is important for parents because early detection of developmental delay can lead to better treatment through early intervention. Screening tests, often based on questions answered by a parent, are used to assess children's development, but responses from only one parent can be subjective and even inaccurate due to limited memory and observations. In this work, we propose a collaborative child development tracking system, where screening test responses are collected through collaboration between parents or caregivers. We implement BebeCODE, a mobile system that encourages parents to independently answer all developmental questions for a given age and resolve disagreements through chatting, image/video sharing, or asking a third person. A 4-week deployment study of BebeCODE with 12 families found that parents had approximately 22% disagreements about questions regarding their children's developmental and BebeCODE helped them reach a consensus. Parents also reported that their awareness of their child's development, increased with BebeCODE.

Parent-training is commonly used to support intervention of children with language delay. Unfortunately, parents find it difficult to apply the training to their child in everyday life and often give up on their parent-child interaction. In this work, we propose and evaluate TalkLIME -- a mobile system that provides real-time feedback to improve the parent-child interaction and reinforce parent-training intervention. We first conduct a survey to understand parents' feedback preference for the mobile system and determine that a non-invasive feedback using the mobile phones screen is preferable. TalkLIME was developed to provide real-time feedback through the mobile phone screen while also providing motivation to the parents to consistently continue parent-child interaction through both short-term and long-term goals. A six-weeks user study was conducted with eight parents and their children with language delay. Our results show that the experimental group who used TalkLIME showed a significant improvement in the child's initiation ratio, an important metric in the language development of children.