Almost a cuddle from mum

Text from Creative Amsterdam:

Sadly, a cuddle from mum or dad before going to sleep isn’t always possible when you’re a child staying in hospital long-term. And your little sister or brother isn’t there to tickle you, like at home. So to ensure that young patients of 8 to 12 years old can stay in touch with the family in more immediate ways than mail or phone, the Waag Society created Scottie.

With Scottie, the child in hospital and the family at home each get a small toy-like figure, which can light up in different colours and vibrate. So parents and children can communicate in codes that they have agreed together. If the mother at home strokes the Scottie, it changes colour and the child knows that mum is thinking of him or her. The patient can return the cuddle – a real result, because children in a hospital cannot easily call or mail at any given time.

Scottie has been developed by the Fablab and Waag Society, a foundation with a mission to provide “creative technology for social innovation”. Some of their technical applications are interesting for the consumer market and can become developed into products. Scottie is currently still at the prototype stage. An impact study will assess how well it works: for example, the colours have to be clearly differentiated, and so on. The foundation has a commercial company, Waag Products, to bring any potential product version to the market.



Games Atelier, a Waag Society application for education, is at a further stage in the process. With this new educational tool, pupils can create, play, share and view their own locative mobile games with GPS equipped mobile phones and an Internet application. Students can get lessons on the street, thanks to their mobiles. Using their telephones, they can do assignments in which they do research (where was a certain building in former days?) and make their own photographs and films.

Games Atelier has been tested, and the results were positive and clear. The Waag Society’s starting point was that serious games have an added value in education. This intuitive assumption appeared be correct: kids with a mobile on the street learned more and better than kids in the classroom with the traditional curriculum.

The future according to the Waag Society? Internet 3.0, or the Internet of objects. With GPS technology and refined applications, we will be online always and everywhere. The objects around us are a part of that, thanks to electronic tags. So in the city we might get a message telling us we’re close to a museum, plus information on its current collection and other options.

Via: Creative Amsterdam