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Evaluating Supports for Group Play-Based Therapy with Social Validity
Conference proceeding   Open access

Evaluating Supports for Group Play-Based Therapy with Social Validity

Flannery Hope Currin, Guadalupe Camacho-Arias, Meredith Onions, Tiffany M Michels, Summer Schmuecker, Hannah Cargo, Josephine Geiger-Lee, Delaney Norris and Juan Pablo Hourcade
Proceedings of the 25th Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference, pp.451-463
ACM Conferences
IDC '26: Proceedings of the 25th Interaction Design and Children Conference
06/22/2026
DOI: 10.1145/3773077.3810977
url
https://doi.org/10.1145/3773077.3810977View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

Robots and voice agents are increasingly used in therapy with children. However, little work to date has explored whether and how these tools might support holistic therapy approaches in group play-based settings, which introduce extra considerations compared to individual, task-oriented therapy contexts. In this paper, we describe three multi-week case studies in which an occupational therapist and two speech-language pathologists used a system consisting of a set of e-book stories and a teleoperated voice agent with neurodiverse groups of 5-8-year-old children in group play-based therapy settings. We interviewed therapists, focusing on how the system supported or could better support the social validity of the interventions in terms of goals, procedures, and outcomes. We contribute design implications for tools to support group play-based therapy contexts and explain how social validity can be applied to the evaluation of socially assistive technologies.
 Human-centered computing -- Auditory feedback Human-centered computing -- Collaborative and social computing Human-centered computing -- User studies Social and professional topics -- Children

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