Complementary feeding is crucial to promote healthy nutrition in infant and young children (IYC) and prevent malnutrition. Mothers, families, and healthcare professionals (HCPs) are crucial in helping IYC develop healthy eating habits. However, limited access to adequate nutritional information and health services impacts children’s nutrition, especially in low-resource settings. Technology opens up opportunities to address these challenges and potentially improve IYC feeding practices. Taking a co-design approach, we conducted low-fidelity prototyping workshops with caregivers and HCPs to explore the potential of tangible interfaces to facilitate play and promote healthy nutrition for IYC in two low-resource healthcare settings in Peru. Participants envisioned diverse tangible objects and interactions that could augment the waiting spaces of the healthcare centres, encouraging play and enhancing children’s and caregivers’ experiences, while promoting healthy nutrition and dietary diversity. We outline design opportunities to facilitate tangible play, shared playful experiences, and promote healthy nutrition in low-resource healthcare settings.

Children with autism found free play difficult. Free play is important for children with autism to help them develop social, communication, and expression skills. Interactive surfaces (IS) offer a casual and natural collaborative and engaging experience adequate to promote free play for children with autism. In this poster, we present the design and development of BendableSound, a fabric-based IS that allows children play music when tapping and touching on digital elements appearing on top of the fabric. To design BendableSound, we followed a user-centered design process involving interviewing, observation, and design sessions with caregivers. We close discussing directions for future work.