Telepresence under Exceptional Circumstances: Enriching the Connection to School for Sick Children.

Video mediated communication has become a familiar computer-based experience for many people including those who participate in long-distance meetings, take part remotely in professional conferences and attend distance learning courses. Children in extreme academic or medical circumstances may also benefit because of the unique opportunities presented by video-mediated communication. In this paper we present a video-mediated communication system, PEBBLESTM, that combines video-conferencing with simple robotics to link a child in a hospital with the regular school classroom. Three children in unusual, and even exceptional, circumstances related to their health and social background, their hostile environments and academic difficulties used PEBBLES “to attend school” for an extended period of time. These remote students were measured on concentration, initiative and communication interactions. Results from these three cases illustrate that, over time, remote students were able to engage in the same tasks as their peers (with minimal disturbances to their concentration), to initiate positive contributions to the classroom, and to communicate.