Jan 3 2018
emotix, a start-up created by leading scientists, educators, psychologists and robotics researchers, will launch its flagship product, Miko+ , in the US market at CES 2018.
Miko+ is a next-generation companion robot for children incorporating advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology with significantly enhanced emotional and social intelligence capabilities. Miko+ will be the latest offering from emotix following the immensely successful launch of the Miko robot in India in 2016.
Parents are challenged to balance the increasing technology exposure and usage by their children at a very young age along with family bonding time1. Miko+’s interactive features provide both advanced companionship with learning and development benefits to children and, at the same time, enables closer interactions between family members. Additionally, Miko+ is also the only empathy-centric social robot in which parents can monitor and manage their child’s interactions via an accompanying parental analytics dashboard.
“Miko is a wonderful companion for providing children a fun-filled experience, containing impressive interactive technology that engages a child and a design that is extremely trendy and child-friendly,” said Dr. Mona Gajre, renowned Professor of Pediatrics in charge of the Pediatric Neurodevelopment Centre in Mumbai, India. Dr. Gajre has closely advised on the development of Miko.
“While It makes learning fun and engages the child actively in different tasks, its non-threatening, human way of interacting with children has immense potential to be used as a tool to aid learning and training in schools”, she added.
“Through extensive research and observation, we found that current generations of social robots did not address the unmet needs of parents to foster closer interactions between family members as well as integrating their involvement in their children’s learning and development process“, said Sneh Vaswani, CEO and founder of emotix. “We understood this conundrum facing parents and wanted to develop a social robot that would provide benefits to them on a number of levels, giving children a technology interface that becomes a strong value addition to and not a substitute for the family unit, and that also enables parents to actively participate in their child’s developmental education.”
emotix’s vision is to develop and introduce new generations of social robots that solve vexing consumer problems by fostering the highest levels of emotionally and empathy-responsive social interactions between humans and machines. The Miko+ platform aims to enhance two-way child learning and development beyond the current limitations of smartphone, video game, tablet or other online child development and learning based technology platforms.
“Miko is a great example of how artificial intelligence can help teachers and students get more out of the evolving educational ecosystem and is surely a significant step towards the future of the educational journey, said Dr. Manoj Singh, President-Future Schools@India and Vice Chancellor-DSK World University, Pune India. “Miko’s story-telling and classroom learning simulation capabilities nurture engaging and innovative individualized learning for children while also assisting students and teachers to achieve higher levels of teaching and learning through adaptive learning programs, games and software,” he added.
emotix will be demonstrating Miko+ as well as showcasing its vision for the future of social robotics technology at Booth # 25700 at CES.
1 http://www.smh.com.au/comment/technology-harming-family-life-blame-the-parents-20130709-2pndz.html