Research on basic elements of trust relationship formation of caregiver-child and child-child（Joint research with TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION）

We have the wish to help each child to live with a sense of security in daycare and have the wish to enable childcare workers and parents to monitor the growth of the children more objectively and efficiently. Sharing this wish together, in 2017, CEDEP and TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION jointly conducted research on automatically measuring the social behavior of children in the 1-year-old class at a daycare using AI technology.

In this research, the AI learns to identify individuals from images and track specific actions, and automatically extracts and measures the behavioral scenes of each child from videos captured by the small observational cameras set up in the room for 1-year-old children in the daycare. The targeted behaviors are two as follow; attachment-like approaching behavior from the child to the caregiver (as the basis for building a relationship of caregiver-child) and approaching behavior from the child to other child (as a manifestation of the child's sociality). After a year of research, we were able to recognize these behaviors to some extent with AI, although the data was insufficient.