Eliciting parents' insights into products for supporting and tracking children's fine motor development

Abstract

Early development of fine motor skills is a critical milestone for children, which also helps the formation and maturation of other developmental areas like language development. While toys and daily artefacts could support children's fine motor skills, parents play a profound role in monitoring their developmental progress. Although there are several products to support fine motor development and help parents monitor their children's progress, the literature lacks a source that might inform the design of such products. As the first step of a bigger research project, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 parents to gather their insights into and expectations of such supportive products. We designed a sensor-embedded toy concept, ANIMO, aimed at supporting the fine motor development of 7 to 24-month-old children and assisting parents in tracking their children's developmental progress via a mobile app. We showed this concept to parents during interviews to facilitate the insight elicitation process. We present ANIMO, three themes summarizing parents' insights and expectations into products supporting fine motor development along with implications for their design.