Meet Moxie
With its blue body, big anime eyes, and head shaped like a teardrop, Moxie wants to be friends with your child.
The robot companion is designed to support social, emotional and cognitive development in children between the ages of five and 10, through play-based learning and lessons on turn-taking and eye contact. Launched in 2020, Moxie was developed by Embodied, a robotics company based in Pasadena, California.
"Our collective vision is to create robots that are going to benefit society," says Paolo Pirjanian, the founder and CEO of Embodied. The roboticist and former NASA scientist founded the company in 2016 and oversaw the creation of Moxie. Pirjanian says the animate bot builds a relationship with children by "teaching children about how to parse and label their different emotions."
Equipped with microphones, a camera and sensors, Moxie was created with the expertise of technologists, child development specialists and storytellers from the likes of Disney and the Jim Henson Company. In 2020, Moxie was named one of Time's top inventions of the year.
For Pirjanian, Moxie is an attempt to rethink what human-machine interaction can look like: by a creating socially and emotionally intelligent robot friend.
Pirjanian says, "We literally have the potential to help the next generation of children have much higher EQ and the soft skills that will help them grow to healthier, more balanced people in society."
A total of 51 families completed pre- and post-assessments and were included in our analysis. Findings indicate that after one month of interacting with Moxie:
- 71% of children made SOME improvement in social skills
- 50% of children made SIGNIFICANT improvement in social skills
- 69% of children made SOME improvement in behavior
- 49% of children made SIGNIFICANT improvement in behavior
- Neurotypical and Neurodiverse children improved equally on social skills
- Biggest areas of change: communication, social engagement, emotion regulation