An Employed Mother’s Perspective towards the Use of Technology to Enhance Emotional Connection with Her Baby

摘要: The mother’s presence and role in early developmental stage of the baby’s life is very important. However, many modern working mothers are caught in the dilemma of balancing career with spending personal time with their baby. The aim of the project is to explore the use of technology to enhance interaction between the working mother and her baby during periods of physical separation of mother from the baby. A user study was conducted on 74 working mothers and the data was analyzed to investigate the effects of separation anxiety on working mothers. Also, a systematic approach has been proposed to develop signal monitoring device which captures biological data of the baby to interpret the emotional state. It would provide a bi-directional method of communication between mother and the baby during the absence of direct physical contact. A comforting feedback would be sent to the baby when he/she is restless. The interpretation of the baby’s status would be done by an expert system which would be based on the data collected from the baby and the data stored in the central database.