BUDDY is an interactive therapy toy that facilitates social interactions between autistic children and their parents by educating and training joint attention and emotional recognition. The simple form factor and mechanisms provide meaningful features, creating opportunities for parents and educators to improve the children's communication skills. It facilitates better social relationships while also making the learning process fun and engaging.
CORE 77 Design Award: 2015 Runner Up
User Research
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neural disorder that delays a person's ability to learn and socialise with people. It prevents young children from developing social communication skills that are otherwise simple to anyone else. Some of these attributes are sensory impairments and lack of focus to conversations and surroundings.
The disorder is the second most prevalent neuro-developmental disorder among children. In a study by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, it was shown that 1 in 68, or 40,000 children were diagnosed with autism in 2010 in Australia alone. The total amount of diagnosis is expected to grow dramatically across the world over the years.
Concept Development
This project aims to improve joint attention and emotion recognition in children with autism. The intervention targets children at the age between 0 to 8 years old to help them develop fundamental social interaction. As a result, they are more prepared for future living and challenges.
The product should be fun, effective, simple to use by parents, therapists, and children. By applying it into daily routines, it would help children to understand and improve social interactions, while improving relationships between them and their parents.
Function 1:
Joint Attention & Emotion Recognition
Children with autism often feel intimidated by human interactions, therefore they develop preference to objects because they are predictable and safe. BUDDY helps to improve joint attention and recognise the most basic emotions in conversations: happiness, anger and sadness. Each emotion is simplified into cartoons embedded onto the interchangeable heads. By utilising the respective head, parents can convey conversations through BUDDY, and train the child to develop eye contacts and understand subtle facial expressions during social interactions.
Function 2:
Motivative Mechanism
BUDDY has built-in mechanisms that make its head "nod" with the push buttons on the sides. The feature is used by parents to encourage and praise the child when he performs the exercise correctly. The sustainable, yet meaningful mechanism adds functionality and purpose to the product without sacrificing manufacturing costs or using electricity.
Function 3:
Generalisation
However, due to the nature of autism, it is difficult for children to use their learned skills across different environments and unfamiliar settings.
A series of exercise is designed with BUDDY to allow the children to generalise their understanding and practice in various scenarios. By using the online software and placing photographic "masks" of different faces, it gradually progresses from cartoons, to family members, and finally to strangers. This transition from familiar figures to the unfamiliar helps children with autism to know important persons, for example, the teachers, and expand their social interaction skills under different contexts.
Prototyping & User Testing
To test the efficiency of the prototypes, it was brought to the child and mother from research phase with a series of activities. The mother followed the instructions and tried to communicate with her son through BUDDY.
The tests were successful. The child was able to perform the activities with ease, and made sufficient social contacts with his mother quickly and adaptively. While the tests are successful in this setting, it would require further testings with other potential users to fully prove BUDDY's efficiency in the masses.
Designed For Life
BUDDY is designed to last. Its versatility allows it to match the needs of every child with autism. Not only that it improves the overall growth of the children, but also is an essential tool for parents to socialise and communicate with them. Psychologists and therapists who are specialised in children health care can also use the product during therapy sessions with clients.
