Product Design's Shirley Rodriguez gets arthritic children playing

“Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.” - Charles Eames

A chronic illness diagnosis is hard for anyone and children especially. So when undergraduate Product Design student Shirley Rodriguez learned that children could suffer debilitating arthritis, she was determined to design a solution to help ease their suffering.

Following Eames’ dictum, she created an elegant product to motivate children to exercise their joints, and help push arthritis into remission. The result is Monstas. Shirley is currently seeking angel investors and studying abroad with Art Center’s INSEAD program to acquire the business skills necessary turn Monstas into a reality. The project was designed at Art Center and is currently in competition at the James Dyson Foundation.

In her own words:

Monstas are interactive exercise toys for children with Juvenile Arthritis, they help strengthen the joints.

The Inspiration

I’ve been exposed to arthritis since I was very young due to my father being a physical therapist at an adult daycare facility. My time after school was spent amongst the elderly playing checkers, painting grannies nails or listening to stories of their younger days. I must have been around 11 when I asked why my new friends weren’t able to pick up objects and were always dropping things.

My father explained what arthritis was to me, but I didn’t really understand until he said, “You know all the games you play with your hands? Well, they can’t play like that. It hurts them.” That stuck with me for a long time and I would think about it every day I came into the office. It wasn’t until 2013 that I learned children could get arthritis too. It was an immense blow to my heart. I had seen what arthritis could do, how painful and how limiting it was. Through research and talking to my father I realized that you CAN do something about arthritis, you can drive it into remission.

Arthritis can be taken into remission through constant exercise, but no one wants to exercise because it is dull, repetitive and painful. If you don’t exercise your joints aren’t getting stronger and your arthritis is not getting any better. I read many blogs, became part of many online communities and spoke to mothers of children with juvenile arthritis they helped drive the subject even closer to my heart. It is my personal goal to create something that could help drive arthritis away and allow children to play and move without feeling pain.

Stages of Development

Monstas evolved over time to be intuitive, reactive, safe and most importantly fun. Monstas began as an analog exercise book and transformed into an app based game that worked with physical toys. It was important that the product was easy to use and could cause no additional harm to children. It was evident that the product needed to give feedback to the child as well as teach them how to exercise correctly. To achieve this I explored various forms of exercising the joints of the hands through paper, foam and sponge prototypes each tested with children to see how they would be played with. This gave insight about the ergonomics and whether the right joints were being exercised. A large amount of time was spent on developing a mechanism that was simple and fool proof which could allow the physical toy to be detected by a tablet when exercising. Various materials and systems were tested with children for feasibility and ease of use. Over 20 small prototypes were created as different exercises were explored and refined. Monstas is not yet commercialized, but I am working on creating the digital gaming platform and prototyping it.

The Function

The main problem with arthritis is the lack of daily exercise. The challenge was to motivate children to exercising on their own, rather than being forced to do it. The solution was an interactive game on the iPad that used ergonomic tools to strengthen the most affected joints of the hands.The game provides feedback to the child on how to accurately perform each exercise. Moreover, the tools only afford one hand position and focuses on one joint group to further provide correct exercising. It is a fun game that helps children forget they have a disease and that they are actually exercising their hands. Monstas uses simple electrical conduction to let the tablet know the tool is active. Conductive silicone on the inside and the outsides of the tool come together when the child does an exercise. Only when the tool is squeezed, exercising, does the circuit complete and the tablet recognizes it. The tools can be played with or without the iPad, and the iPad game still provides basic hand exercises without the tools.