SAM: The School Attachment Monitor

Secure Attachment relationships have been shown to minimise social and behavioural problems in children and boosts resilience to risks later on such as antisocial behaviour, heart pathologies, and suicide. Attachment assessment is an expensive and time-consuming process that is not often performed. The School Attachment Monitor (SAM) automates Attachment assessment to support expert assessors. It uses doll-play activities with the dolls augmented with sensors and the child's play recorded with cameras to provide data for assessment. Social signal processing tools are then used to analyse the data and to automatically categorize Attachment patterns. This paper presents the current SAM interactive prototype.