Empowering Reality: A New Injury Prevention Education System to Promote the Empowerment of Child Caregivers

Abstract

Although awareness about the importance of injury prevention has been increasing among Japanese people, preventable injuries remain the third leading cause of death in children aged 0–14 years, and prevention of these injuries is critically important in terms of childhood health. To identify dangerous situations for children and provide preventive measures to avoid such situations, this paper proposes an effective method, called “Empowering Reality (ER)”, that integrates knowledge graphs with object detection to enable lecturers to educate caregivers on preventing unintentional childhood injuries while communicating with caregivers using augmented reality technology. The proposed ER system consists of knowledge graphs for explaining dangerous situations, an online video capture part, and a situation recognition part. This paper describes the major advantages of knowledge graphs that consider not only the relationship between objects and injuries, but also dangerous layouts with the help of “inclusion” and “collocation” features. The feasibility and effectiveness of the system were evaluated through tests among caregivers, including 11 parents and six teachers from three nursery schools. This system allows lecturers to conduct in-situ suggestions about specific preventive measures adapted to the home or nursery school environment via online learning