Designing a smart toy: guidelines from the experience with smart dolphin "SAM"

Digitally enriched interactive physical objects, or "smart objects", might enable new educational interventions for persons with Neurodevelopmental Disorder (NDD). This paper presents the experience with SAM, a dolphin-shaped smart toy. SAM is inspired by the practice of Pet Therapy and is designed to engage people with NDD in a variety of tasks through a set of multisensory stimuli and various modes of interaction. SAM can be used alone or integrated with digital content or smart space components such as digitally controlled lights, sounds, and bubble makers. SAM behavior can be customized by therapists to address the specific needs of each person with NDD. We describe the progression of SAM prototypes, from a "stand-alone" tangible object to a multimodal smart toy integrated with multimedia contents or the whole smart environment. The design process of SAM involved NDD specialists at two therapeutic centers as well as persons with NDD. From this experience, we derived some guidelines generalizable to the design of any smart toy for people with NDD.