Internet of Toys for Measuring Drawing Skills and Supporting Childcare

During childhood, play is important for promoting the mental and physical development of children. For this reason, those involved with childcare (guardians and childcare workers) need to create an environment suitable for child development and provide children with support and guidance. However, because there are unique elements to the development of each individual child, childcare workers caring for large numbers of children, and guardians in remote areas, may struggle to oversee the daily development of the children in their care. Particularly in Japan, the lack of vacancy at nursery schools and the number of nursery school teachers is regarded as a problem in spite of declining birth rate. Therefore, there is a strong desire to realize a society in which children can be raised safely and securely without burdening parents and childcare workers. To solve this problem, we propose various types of toys with built-in sensors that are used to collect motion data during play activities, and a system intended to help estimate the child's development stage by creating a data visualization for childcare workers. In this paper, we built a pen-holder type device for measuring the development of drawing skills. Using this prototype, as the first step of an evaluation, we conducted an experiment to verify whether it is possible to discern four types of drawings focusing on changes in drawing skills related to child development. The results showed that they could be identified with 75.75% (SVM) and 69.25% (RF) accuracy.