Parents who become soldiers have a difficult time saying goodbye to their children when they get deployed. This distance between a parent and child can cause emotional and developmental issues for the child. Our intimate device pair aims to relieve this pain and longing caused by the physical distance between a soldier and their child.
This device pair consists of two dog-tag necklaces, one for the parent and the child. If the child misses the parent, they can send a signal via light to the parent’s dog-tag. The parent receives this signal and can send their heartbeat and a heat sensation back to the child. The child will then feel the parent’s heartbeat through vibration, light, and heat. The same process works if the parent misses the child.
In this project’s infancy, we initially thought to create a pair that involved motion. We explored having the parent and child both have a teddy bear that when picked up, the other teddy bear would receive that signal and move to “hug” the receiver. This became too complicated with a number of motors that would be required and also this iteration lost sight of the goal of our product - to reduce the amount of longing between the parent and child.
We then explored sending and receiving sounds instead of motions. We explored sending a pre-recorded lullaby every time one party missed the other. This we felt wasn’t an intimate enough gesture so we scrapped that idea.
Finally, we arrived at the conclusion to explore touch and vibration between the parent and child. This exploration allowed us to come up with the concept of sending a heartbeat and heat to the receiving party.
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