Mohsena Ashraf

Creative storytelling with parents plays an important role in child development including language skills, social competence, and emotional understanding. Recognizing the challenges parents face in finding time for storytelling due to work and home responsibilities, we explore the feasibility of ChatGPT for engaging children in creative storytelling. This study investigates the use of ChatGPT, a conversational agent powered by GPT-4, in creative storytelling with children aged 5-6, comparing its interaction styles with those of parents. The current study included eight child-parent dyads. We found that children were engaged in shorter and more frequent interactions with parents compared to ChatGPT. ChatGPT and parents asked different types of questions, and ChatGPT more frequently provided positive feedback compared to parents. More children selected the interactions with ChatGPT as their favorite interactions. The study provides preliminary evidence on ChatGPT's interaction styles and insights into its potential role in supporting families in creative storytelling activities.

Empathy for children is critical for designing AI technologies that may affect children. This paper presents the work in progress of a study on the feasibility of a new method to provide objective understanding of people’s empathy for children based on functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Adult participants (n=13) were presented with benign or concerning scenarios involving children interacting with AI technologies. Their brain activation patterns were recorded and analyzed. Preliminary data analysis revealed distinctive patterns in the mPFC region, which justifies future work to fully realize the potential of this method.

Proper and sufficient health-care services have always been of great importance to the society and its’ people. There are some common health issues that are frequently faced by people which can be taken care of by introducing innovative healthcare and monitoring systems. Diabetes is one of these issues as recent studies state that a total number of 387 million people all over the world are suffering from it. This number is even more alarming in the developing countries as there are approximately 7 million people suffering from diabetes on an average in each developing country. In this prospect, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can provide a monitoring system with the help of interactive smart applications such as smart phone applications (apps) which provides the users with real time monitoring, suggestions and also, provides statistical report to indicate progress of healthcare. There are a significant number of smartphone applications in various operating systems (OSs) such as Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows etc. that provide previously stated features. However, due to the widespread use in the developing countries and abundance of free applications of Android OS, this study only reviews Android based apps. By analyzing the features and usefulness of these apps, 54 apps have been identified with satisfactory level of functionality. In our study, we compare these apps to analyze the provided features and the feasibility of these apps for becoming a robust interactive system for continuous monitoring and support for people with diabetes. This study could lead to the development of a complete monitoring system and would take the health-care system to a whole new level for the developing countries.