Playful interactive mirroring to support bonding between parents and children with Down Syndrome

This paper presents the ongoing design research and preliminary results in the field of family-centered healthcare, in particular directed to families with children at the age of 0-2 years with Down Syndrome. A central concern of these families is parent-child bonding, as bonding is often disrupted due to a lack of feedback from infants. We designed for parent-child bonding following a multi-stakeholder inquiry, in our case a family, a developmental and child psychologist, a physiotherapist specialized in child-care, and a family therapist. Based on an inquiry we argue that parent-child bonding can be supported through playful interactive mirroring. We designed a prototype to promote mirroring through multimodal stimuli, such as light and sound. As a first evaluated prototype resulted in enthusiasm and a sense of pride for the parents, we propose further explorations on the notion of playful interactive mirroring and future studies with the designed platform.