Puffy

Puffy: a Mobile Inflatable Interactive Companion for children with Neurodevelopmental Disorder
Coordinator:	AndreaBonarini (andrea.bonarini@polimi.it), FrancaGarzotto ()
Tutor:	MirkoGelsomini (mirko.gelsomini@polimi.it)
Collaborator:
Students:	GiuseppeDiFrancesco (giuseppe1.difrancesco@mail.polimi.it), SimonePenati (simone1.penati@mail.polimi.it)
Research Area:	Robotics
Research Topic:	Robot Development
Start:	2017/10/13
Status:	Active
Level:	Ms
Type:	Thesis

Description

Puffy is a robotic companion that has been designed in cooperation with a team of therapists and special educators as a learning & play companion for children with Neurodevelopmental Disorder (NDD). Puffy has a combination of features that support multisensory stimuli and multimodal interaction and make this robot unique with respect to existing robotic devices used for children with NDD. The egg-shaped body of Puffy is inflatable, soft, and mobile. Puffy can interpret child's gestures and movements, facial expressions and emotions; it communicates with the child using voice, lights and projections embedded in its body, as well as movements in space.

The video of Puffy as it was presented to the ACM SIGCHI Conference 2017 in Denver (CO) after the end of the Advanced User Interfaces in which it was first developed: [1]