munchee
For my final year project, I want to tackle a problem my mum faced when I was a small toddler and help parents make mealtimes more healthy and rewarding for young fussy children.
The Challenge
There were many challenges to solve for this problem: • How could I encourage parents and young children to engage with healthy mealtimes? • How could I change the mindset of young fussy children? • How could I make meal times more enjoyable and rewarding for young fussy children? • How could I create something that will make a difference for parents with young fussy children? • How could I create something that is safe for children to use? Loughborough Design School allowed me to engage with family and friends, with young fussy children. Collecting their user requirements and their qualitative feedback throughout the process allowed me to answer these questions.
The first step was to gather insights from parents of family members and family friends and prioritise their requirements. It was important to understand what food they feed to their children throughout the day and what food items they avoid.
Parents wanted a user experience that would encourage children to be part of the dinner process and incorporate the star reward system their children used in school. For those that were really fussy, getting one or two stars would be a big achievement and a reward could be extra play time in the evening.
After dismantling several digital weighing scales, I plugged a strain gauge into an Ardunio and use software to filter out larger increases in weight just in case the child leant on the plate on threw a tantrum during the meal. The electronic food tray acted as a dock for the plate and it had three rubber feet and the top foot was connected to a strain gauge and it allowed me to track the change in mass of the meal (grams/sec).
After building several blue foam prototypes and a working interaction rig, I did some qualitative user testing with the parents to validate initial concepts and confirm the key user requirements for the electronic dinner tray:
· It must be easy for the parent to set the weight of the meal before dinner begins
· The product shall detect small mouthfuls
· The product shall detect when food is put back onto the plate, especially if they are playing with their food or there is a piece of food they didn't enjoy
· The product shall detect when cutlery is placed on top of the plate
· The product shall detect if the child is being playful with the dinner set, i.e. hitting the plate with their hand or the cutlery
There wasn’t enough time to write and test the code for all the specified requirements, but they were the foundation for calculating the average weight over time. The weight was measured by the strain gauge every 500ms and any momentary spikes were filtered with a decision tree. If the average weight dropped by 10% within a ten second window, a golden yellow LED star would flash and a motivational voice prompt would be played. There were five different Munchee monster voice prompts to maintain engagement with the child.
The LED would turn solid and a reward voice prompt would play when the average weight did not increase or continued to drop. Five stars equated to eating at least half of their meal and there were two more additional stars if they could eat more. Parents were able to change these thresholds if they downloaded the Munchee app.
The visual design of Munchee came from the sketches for a laptop and an MP3 player designed by Carl Liu. However, the design of the cutlery came from anthropometric data supplied by the ergonomic department at Loughborough Design School.
It was important that children still recognised the device as a dinner plate and not a toy and the function had to follow the form. If it was too heavy or too thick, young children wouldn’t be able to pick it up and take it to their dinner table.
Parents thought it would be nice to have a travel bag for the device so they could take it to their grandparent’s house or when they go out for lunch.
The end result was an interactive dinner plate and a cutlery set that encouraged young fussy children, aged 3-6+ to finish their healthy meal. The removable plate and the cutlery were dishwasher friendly. The dock itself was designed to be IP rated as it’s likely it would get covered in sauce from messy children. The plate incorporated the Munchee monsters to promote parents (and children) to learn the 5-A-Day ingredients and portions that were being promoted by the NHS.
The reaction to the visual model was overwhelming as the parents and children really engaged with the NHS 5-Day and the children enjoyed the Munchee monster characters as they made meal times more fun again. The interactive prototype with the strain gauge electronics proved that star LED’s were rewarding and increased the total number of mouthfuls of healthy food items compared to their original meal time scenarios.
The business case including two SKU’s and the top SKU had Bluetooth connectivity so the parent could download the app to; track their progress, select the language for their Munchee monster reward voice prompts that could be played on the dock.
