Research Impact: The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recently launched a competition on Interactive Design and Children (IDC) that focused on the full-body interaction in reaction to decline of children’s health. One of the emphases was on the lack of physical activity, therefore it was important to enter this competition from the perspective of physical activity health promotion. Kwok Ng joined a team of researchers at the University of Eastern Finland to work with school-aged children to discuss ideas in which design could be used to bring forward practical solutions to improve their health. From this process, the birth of the Digipack Pro was written as an entry into the Grand Challenge. After it was accepted as a finalist, Kwok’s colleague – Senior Research Calkin Montero presented the paper at the IDC conference and was later informed the paper was the winner of the competition with the best solution.
The IDC conference is the prime venue in the field of interaction design with children and the topic of the conference this year was Live Healthy! Under this theme, children from all over the world proposed ideas about technologies that would help them feel better and healthier.
Montero, C.S., Ng, K. and Kärnä, E., 2019, June. Digipack Pro: Revamping Social Interactions and Supporting Physical Activity. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (pp. 751-754). ACM.
The competition entry video can be found from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IylOIjWJNHYI. DC 2019 R&D Competition: http://idc.acm.org/2019/research-design-competition/ Digipack Pro presentation (13.6): https://idc.acm.org/2019/advance-program/
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