Social Robots to Encourage Play for Children with Physical Disabilities: Learning from Family Units

Children with disabilities have fewer opportunities and lower motivation for play, impacting their cognitive and social de-velopment. Leveraging co-design and participatory design we plan to conduct a study with children with physical disabili-ties and their families to learn the requirements, concerns, barriers, and opinions about using social robots to facilitate play in children with physical disabilities. Combining the in-sights gathered from the families with knowledge from litera-ture, we hope to outline the requirements needed to direct fu-ture research with a grounded understanding of the practical and social landscape these social robots would need to be de-signed within.