Toward AI-Based Child Emotion Early Warning Systems in Child-Oriented Digital Environments: A Socio-Technical Systematic Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63158/journalisi.v8i4.1811Keywords:
child emotion recognition, artificial intelligence, caregiver decision support, explainable AI, privacy-aware systemsAbstract
AI-based emotion recognition is gaining increasing attention in child-oriented digital environments, including digital play, AI toys, online learning, therapeutic platforms, and interactive child-computer systems. However, the translation of recognized emotions into responsible caregiver-facing early warnings remains insufficiently explored. This systematic literature review synthesizes technical and socio-technical perspectives on child emotion recognition, focusing on sensing modalities, AI approaches, datasets, alert interpretation, trust, privacy, ethics, governance, and caregiver acceptance. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, 400 records from Scopus and IEEE Xplore were screened, resulting in 32 studies included in the core synthesis. The findings reveal that facial-expression analysis and convolutional neural networks dominate current research, while child-specific datasets, multimodal learning, real-world validation, uncertainty communication, privacy-by-design, and caregiver-centered evaluation remain limited. This review proposes a socio-technical framework linking AI emotion inference with explainable alert translation, privacy-aware governance, and caregiver decision support. The proposed emotion-to-alert mechanism remains conceptual and requires empirical validation before practical deployment.
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