Glued
Glued is an app for smartphones and tablets that monitors daily usage and helps families tackle the growing worldwide problem of device dependency. It does this through a unique method of rewarding points to parents and kids for positive device usage, device downtime and sticking to daily screen time limits.
There is now an abundance of evidence to show that excessive screen time can lead to a wide range of behavioral and developmental problems in children and young people. A child born today will have spent a full year glued to screens by the time they reach the age of 7.
Although many parents have a nagging sense that they should do more to limit screen-time they are often at a loss as to how to go about this. It can be extremely challenging and frustrating and can lead to family discord.
Too much time spent on devices can lead to a myriad of problems including irritability when interrupted, sleep disturbance, isolation from family and peers, attention deficit, moodiness and weight gain.
Today’s children are clocking up on average 7 hours of screen time per day even though the recommended daily allowance is no more than 2 hours.
Device dependency is not an issue unique to children. In the UK the average person now spends more time on media devices each day than sleeping.
The Glued app rewards points to family members for healthier device usage enabling parents and children to compete and work together to meet weekly targets.
By using the carrot rather than the stick method Glued will help families to unglue from their devices by incentivising with points that lead to rewards. Parents will have more control over screen time and thereby argue less with their kids.
Device users will become more productive as a result of better sleep patterns (it has been shown that using a smartphone just before bed suppresses the bodies’ melatonin levels by as much as 22% – melatonin is the chemical that promotes sleep).
Periodically throughout the day Glued wants to encourage children and parents to earn Glued points by talking to them through Siri: “Finn, it’s time for Downtime on your iPad! Keep it locked for the next hour to win 20 points!” or “Nick, checking your iPhone now isn’t going to help you sleep well tonight”.
We’ve developed a working prototype of Glued that accurately monitors device usage on iPhones and iPads and syncs the data via a cloud-based platform across multiple devices.
The biggest technical challenge with the prototype has been to preserve battery life but ideally not at the expense of losing powerful real-time features like seeing exactly when your kids are online via your own device. So far we’ve managed to achieve 3% battery usage during a 24 hour period of monitoring.
In addition to the technical prototype Keir Ansell has crafted beautiful UI designs for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch that are clean, modern and in keeping with Apple’s own iOS user interface design style.
Award-winning animator and BAFTA judge, Nick Murray-Willis, has created a fun, engaging and informative product animation about how Glued can help families overcome device dependency and work together to lead healthier lives (see above).
The proceeds will be used to hire talent for the development and marketing of the Glued app for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets.