MABLE: Mediating Young Children’s Smart Media Usage with Augmented Reality

There has been a growing concern over the huge increase in use of smart media by young children. This study explores the possibility of using augmented-reality(AR) for regulat-ing preschoolers’ media usage behavior. With MABLE (mobile application for behavioral learning and education), parents can provide AR-assisted feedback by changing facial expressions and sound effects. When overlaying a smart media, which has MABLE running, in front of a QR marker on a puppet, a facial expression is displayed on top of the puppet’s face. A two-week long experiment with 36 parent-child pairs showed that compared to using just the puppet, using MABLE showed higher amount of engage-ment among preschoolers. For the effectiveness of parental mediation in terms of self-control, our data showed mixed results. MABLE had positive effects in that the amount of rule-compliance increased and problematic behaviors de-creased, whereas the level of behavioral dependency on smart media was not influenced.