Behavior Incentivizer

Project :
BIP! [Behavior Incentivizer Project] (Final Name TBD)

Team :
Adam Hutz, Mudit Kakkar, Neera Grover

Objective :
The key objective of this project is to build a Tangible User Interface for children who are in the early phases of language development. It should embody a rewards system,
and require actions from the child to achieve the reward. We aim to design intuitive
triggers to hook them into the interaction loop while also guiding behavior through cues and variable rewards to help inculcate positive habits.

Background :
It’s a challenge to communicate with kids who are in early linguistic or prelinguistic
phases of language development and do not always understand causality of everyday
activities. For instance, it is difficult to explain to a 2yearold that brushing their teeth and bathing everyday are essential for keeping hygiene. Similarly, sleep is an acquired behavior as well, something that children learn over a passage of time. Over the years,experts have delved deep into how children learn – and advanced techniques for patterns of potty training and sleep training. Most of these techniques aim at guiding the child’s behavior through cues, routines and rewards.
We feel that this project is at a unique intersection of behavior change, communication (non or early verbal), and education, all while serving a very specialized user group. It is particularly well suited to be a TUI as it is aimed at kids who aren’t savvy enough to use complicated apps.

Proposal :
BIP is placed in the child’s sleeping area with the intent to cue a sleep routine
1) The parent gives their child a prompt: say, to brush their teeth. Upon successful
completion of the task the adult might give the child a token .
2) The child feeds the token to the pet and the pet does a happy dance.
3) This can be repeated for as many tasks as needed and the tokens keep
collecting inside the toy.
4) The parent can remove them later and start over the next day.

habitcuereward-001-e1447002533148:

Constraints:

Hard to follow a user centred design process as it’s hard to get feedback from users of
this age.

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