Internet of Toys for Measuring Development of Ball Handling Skills in Support of Childcare Workers

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. In this paper, we propose toys with built-in sensors are used to acquire motion data during play activities, and a system intended to aid in estimating the child development stage by creating a data visualization for childcare workers. To establish the proposed system, a ball-type device was created using a built-in acceleration sensor as a prototype of a toy with a built-in sensor. Using this prototype, we conducted an experiment to verify whether it is possible to discern five types of ball activities when focusing on changes in ball-throwing movements related to child development. As the results based on two types of learning algorithms (SVM and RF) indicate, in each case the activity could be identified with approximately 70% accuracy.