Case Study: MIT Media Lab achieves personalized tutoring for children with Affectiva

MIT Media Lab - Customer Case Study

Researchers at MIT Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group faced the challenge of making a social robot better at supporting children’s learning and motivation during educational interactions. They integrated Affectiva’s Emotion SDK for Android into Tega, a new robot platform, so it could sense and respond to children’s facial expressions and adapt its behavior in real time.

Using Affectiva, the team built an affective reinforcement learning system that personalized Tega’s motivational feedback over time. In a two-month study with 34 preschool children, the robot helped students learn new words, improved its personalization across sessions, and produced a significant increase in valence for children who interacted with the personalized robot versus a non-personalizing one.

MIT Media Lab