Designing Human-mediated AI Guidance: Ready Together for Personalized Family Emergency Preparedness

Family emergency preparedness is frequently neglected due to cognitive biases, everyday distractions, and parents' anxiety about frightening their children with discussion of disasters. While large language models can generate personalized recommendations, direct AI-to-child communication is often unsuitable because children have different emotional, cognitive, and contextual needs than adults. This paper introduces the human-mediated AI guidance framework, where a more knowledgeable human—in this case, a parent—acts as an intermediary between an AI system and a less informed recipient. The authors explore this model through Ready Together, an AI-supported system designed to help parents create age-appropriate emergency preparedness guidance for their children.

To understand real-world family challenges, the researchers conducted semi-structured interviews and co-design activities with six parents from diverse cultural backgrounds. Participants identified several barriers to preparedness, including difficulty explaining threats without causing fear, uncertainty about appropriate educational resources, and a preference for interactive, practical learning over passive text. These findings informed the design of Ready Together, an interactive prototype developed in Figma. The system features a parent interface for capturing child and family context, an AI guidance module powered by custom language models, a family activity module, a preparedness plan, and an experience-sharing component.

Participants responded positively to the personalized recommendations and practical activities provided by the system prototype. The results suggest that human-mediated AI guidance effectively supports context-sensitive family preparedness while preserving parents' essential role as ethical gatekeepers and emotional adapters. Rather than replacing parental judgment, the system assists parents in framing situations, structuring context, and selecting appropriate learning activities such as role-playing exercises and family drills. This approach addresses the psychological and emotional barriers that often delay family emergency planning.