RHYME contributed with both a talk/presentation and exhibited Polly World at The Research Council of Norway’s stand in the exhibition hall. RHYME member Anders-Petter Andersson and Fredrik Olofsson demonstrated Polly Ocean, Polly Planet and Polly Fire and the Polly Compose App at the stand.

RHYME member Birgitta Cappelen presented her talk with the title “Vitalizing Welfare Technology – a new paradigm in health technology” during Session B2: Design for Healthcare on the 15th November.
In the abstract she wrote: “Welfare technology often focus on diagnosis, biomedical data and medicine. But health promotion is also about vitality, communication and participation. In The Research Council of Norway financed project, RHYME, we have developed several generations of social, mobile and multi-medial health promoting technologies. These technologies offer new embodied, sensorial, musical and distributed experiences and ways to evoke vitality, co-creation, and strengthen one’s own resources and relations.”

Download the RHYME brochure here

Photo: J. Fagerlönn

RHYME member Anders-Petter Andersson won best paper presentation when he presented Birgitta Cappelen and his paper on AudioMostly2016 the 6th October 2016.  The motivation the committee gave was: “A very pedagogical, well-designed and passionate presentation with humorous and daring elements”

The paper is called ‘Health Improving Multi-Sensorial and Musical Environments’ and, “focus on the designed qualities of the Polly World environment, and specifically on the multi-sensorial and musical interaction design”. In the paper they present how they have designed the interactive music and multi-sensorial qualities of the environment, to make them health promoting, by combining knowledge from the field of interactive Music composition, Interaction Design and Tangible Interaction with knowledge from therapeutic disciplines such as Music and Health, Music Therapy and Sensory Integration. One of the main findings is the positive results moving from Multi-Sensory feedback, focusing on auditive, tactile, visual modalities, to Multi-Sensorial, motivating mastering over time, creating expectations, building on rhythmic, narrative, musical, relational and cultural.

RHYME members Anders-Petter Andersson and Birgitta Cappelen were invited to contribute with lecture and Polly World Workshop at the SPEDUTEC meeting in Goethenburg from November 2nd to 4th.

“SPEDUTEC is a project supported by the Nordplus Horizontal Programme under the Nordic Council of Ministers. The aim is to increase understanding on theory and pedagogical and technological practice on learning through assistive technologies (ATs) in multisensory environments. Furthermore, our goal is to build a new Nordic-Baltic network on the topic. The main working methods is sharing knowledge and experiences, and mutual learning.”

Birgitta and Anders-Petters lecture was called  “5 Generations of RHYME tangibles” and described the RHYME project through 4 generation of observations and development and the current 5 Generation platform used in the Vitalising Welfare Technology course at AHO in October 2015.