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85 Augmenting soft toys for self-reporting well-being

It can be difficult for children to express and reflect on how they are feeling to others. As such, we hypothesise that children can use technology to express and reflect on their well-being. Existing research suggests that tangible interfaces offer a potential of being able to help capture well-being in hospitals for children, such as capitalising on young children’s attraction to toys and play as a way for children to communicate and process their inner thoughts. An aim was to develop a prototype to enable children to communicate and express how they are feeling with others. To ensure that prototypes were safe and appropriate, we involved The Young Persons’ Advisory Group and the Play team to provide vicarious insights about a child’s experiences as part of the design process. This process helped to identify user experience challenges such as when reflecting on the potential for negative experiences. From the insights gained, we developed a system that allows children to augment existing toys to make toys interactive and give children a sense of ownership. There were two key modes of interaction, firstly the soft toy acting as the input mechanism for data to be collected. Secondly, there was a visualisation display which would then render the data for children in an accessible way for them to reflect on. To ensure that the system was safe and appropriate before children used it, we used a ‘proxy’ method to evaluate the system with researchers using prototypes in the wild. It was found that by having a two-pronged approach was considered valuable: (i) the tangible nature of collecting input provided a physical experience of being able to capture and reflect on well-being at the same time, and (ii) viewing visualisations from the system had a positive impact on the self-awareness of well-being.