The quality of parent-child interaction is a key component of health visitor assessments to identify families in need of further support, either from health visitors themselves or other health or children’s services such as parent-infant therapists.
The rapid development of AI-supported technologies means that it may be possible to create tools to automatise the assessment of parent-child interactions, which has the potential to save health visitors valuable time and help them spend more time with families in greater need of support.
However, before such tools are developed, it is essential that we understand the needs and concerns of different stakeholders. This project seeks to find out in what form the automatisation of parent-child interaction assessments would be feasible, acceptable and appropriate to health care professionals and parents/carers.
This project is at a very early stage of development, using exploratory methods to understand what AI-supported assessment of parent-child interactions might look like in places like England. We will explore how different stakeholders feel about this approach, what barriers and concerns they foresee, and how they think such tools should be used.
We are currently investigating parents and carers’ views on AI and technology in the context of health visitors’ developmental checks as part of a Masters’ student research project.
In the future, we hope to explore these questions further with health visitors and other health care professionals through focus groups, surveys and expert workshops.
Thank you to everyone who took part in the survey about the use of AI-based programmes in child development checks, which is now closed.
