Magic Monster

The Magic Monster is a smart-toy designed to aid hand therapy for children with a spastic hand. They are encouraged to do hand exercises while learning to do magic tricks with the monster.

Children with for example hemiplegic cerebral palsy and spasticity in their hands are encouraged to exercise their hand movements for at least 30 minutes per day. These exercises are both long and often boring. The Magic Monster adds a layer of playfulness, which provides extra motivation to do the exercises every day.

The monster consists of a phone that uses AI algorithms for calibration and self-adaptive play complexity and a cuddle toy that is put around the phone.

When the Magic Monster is installed for a child, the physiotherapist calibrates the app together with the child and parent. This is done to calibrate the app to the individual skill level of the child. This skill level defines the sensibility of the monster. The better the child’s skills, the lower the sensibility. With a lower sensibility, the monster requires more challenging movements to perform activities. Later, when the child is using the monster at home, the app keeps track of the amount of attempts the child performs the movement without success. If the number is to high, the threshold for succes will be lowered, and the sensibility will be higher.

Next to automatically updating the sensibility, the monster challenges the child from time to time to increase the difficulty by asking if they want to take it to the next level. The child can decide for themselves whether or not they accept this challenge.

At the end of each play session, the sensor data that is collected will be stored in the phone and sent to the therapist to provide information for reflection.