Project Imaginary Friend (P.I.F.)

Currently, children are not having complete cognitive development, this affects the very life and advancement of the country. To circumvent this situation, we intend to develop a program that, using artificial intelligence and testing, assists in mental and ethical development in early childhood. Our project encompasses a large group of people from diverse economic classes, is attractive to children regardless of their culture, has dynamic activities aimed at the progression of these, presenting interactions with artificial intelligence and other new technologies. All this through your relationship with your "imaginary friend".

The WHO (World Health Organization) has repeatedly warned the international community to early watch for delays and disturbances in child development.  Such abnormalities are associated with the child's elevated risk of developing psychiatric disorders, developmental disorders and learning disabilities, and may eventually develop into contexts that may destabilize family relationships, reduce school engagement, expose the child to social risks, and individual failures in the most diverse  moments of your life.
 The early identification of signs that may suggest problems in the development of the child opens space for remedial interventions and corrections, which will induce the construction of skills that would not have crystallized without proper stimulation.  In this context, cognitive development is important.  It is very important that children be given the opportunity to develop all the important requirements for their cognition, preventing medical and environmental factors that may alter the structure or functioning of the brain.  Cognitive development depends on the involvement of several other functions and the good resourcefulness of other functions that support it such as language, motor coordination and affective-emotional support.

Our direct target audience will be children in the age group of 2 to 12 years, due to the pre-school period and the beginning of the school period, when children need help to adapt to the new world they are entering.  However, it will not only be children who will benefit: parents, who often can not be with their children because of work and / or other reasons, will have resources developed to interact with the child through the imaginary friend.  As P.I.F.  is initially an application, families of different cultures and social classes will be reached and their children will have the tools necessary for the individual construction of early childhood combined with attractive entertainment for these.  Thinking in the long term, the nation will also benefit from more skilled labor and people who from the beginning seek to improve the world.
 To understand more about the relationships of the children of this age group with the environment in which they live, we always look for more and more families and through interviews, we know in more detail the problems, so that we can join solutions increasingly broad and with greater  effect on our project.

Our project initially consists of an application, providing various tools to help the child's development through his virtual imaginary friend.  This imaginary friend is totally personalized for the creative stimulation of the child and social inclusion, allowing the creation of special imaginary friends.
 Once created, the child will have access to a variety of functionalities.  One of them is the Save the World, which creates adventures of the imaginary friend, solving problems around the world. In each mission, the child will receive thematic and appropriate challenges to develop their mental, physical and learning capacities, using interactions with the  This function seeks to develop the child cognitively, in addition to encouraging the first steps to the knowledge of the world, to get to know different cultures of the world throughout history and teach it ethnic concepts based on an egalitarian society that seeks to get out of egocentrism  to improve the world.
 In addition to constructing the relationship between imaginary friend and child, this function creates a combination of entertainment and development of motor and cognitive abilities of the child.  As other functions, we intend to allow the use of both Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality and other technologies to assist such interaction.
 In addition to these functions, we have the so-called Mind-blowing, which would be a kind of fun "virtual school" that uses art, music and other tools to teach basic math topics and even the basics of another language.  Such a function’d be connected to "Save the World" if, in a certain challenge, the child experiences some difficulty in completing.
 We also have the "Tales" function, where the child would have access to countless tales and fables created by us in order to present a certain morality, as well as entertainment. Stories can be told either through videos or by reading someone responsible or  even of the child itself, and will present several other functions that will be introduced to the project as it evolves.
 Not only do we care about the development of the child, but also our relationship with those responsible.  To do this, in addition to the use of the application’s recommended with adult monitoring, a connection between the imaginary friend of a device with another device of the responsible person will facilitate this through personalized quick messages or even called videos.  In addition, the person in charge will have full access to the child's income.

Our project becomes innovative when we use Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality combined with infantile entertainment, knowledge of pedagogy and psychology to develop a tool capable of developing the mind of the child both cognitively and socially and that is also capable of attracting the child and strengthen the family relationship with their parents. All this with the key word of our project: "Interaction" and the "virtual imaginary friend" of the child will be responsible for this. Still, our solution has little cost to the consumers, having a gigantic population reach. The fact that we initially make an app is just to have that reach and pick up most families from around the world.

In relation to artificial intelligence, we want to present it with the main objective of knowing more about the child and analyzing it in order to alert people about a possible problem of cognitive development so that they can solve the problem at an early stage.
 For more virtual reality, they will be used in all application features.  Its goals are to immerse the child in the world of his "imaginary friend" and vice versa, with the goal of strengthening the relationship with him, increasing the interaction between them, and using tests of development in the real world through the improved reality and world  virtual, creating for us, through virtual reality.  As application development develops, more technologies will be implemented and combined to make the child's experience better and more effective.

The development of a child can and should be measured and usually accompanied as one of the health prevention strategies, both in childhood and adolescence. We can verify it in several axes: motor, language, social, affective, adaptive and also cognitive. The divergence between them or delays are observed and, in this way, we can monitor the development of the child in the tests and with the participation of those responsible we can find the solution through activities suggested by Artificial Intelligence.

Our project will be serving all families on the globe as long as they have a cell phone. The number of unique mobile phone users in the world has reached 5 billion by 2017, according to the GSMA report, we will soon get a very good target audience. In 2025, according to the same source, we will have about 5.9 billion people with cell phone access, which would be 71% of the world's population at the time. The audience that will be able to access our application is and will be very large and will always increase.

In a year we will probably be focused on this project and seeking the knowledge and skills to improve the project more and ourselves. In five years we want to continue to update the application and also have new projects from different areas of knowledge. We do not focus on just improving one part of the world, we want to improve as much as we can and be an example of that. Our goal has always been to change the world and make it as possible for future generations.

We have two main problems for the completion of the application: Financial and opportunity to improve our knowledge. Our group is composed of two people so far and none of us have the money to make our project go out of the way, we would need financial assistance. The condition of higher education and government aid for our project is very precarious and we are looking for an institution that can help us with this. These problems can delay our project and so we are here. From today to the next years, our main difficulties will remain the same if we do not have some kind of economic aid.

To overcome our barriers, we will always be willing to look for ways to fund our project and studies, always looking for events like this and other forms.

Detalhes

Our team is composed of two UFF undergraduates, first period.  We work on the project in parallel with our studies in college

Our team did a good part of their High School in Ph, the renowned private college in Brazil. In addition to the fact that one of our members was able to attend UERJ law school (one of the best law schools in Brazil) in the second year of secondary education, completing a period and, by his own decision, studied physics at UFF of the best colleges in Brazil). While the other member finished high school at Pensi College and now attends the UFF Information System. We spent together, from the sixth grade of elementary school to today, thinking and creating ideas and ways to not only change the society we live, but the whole world. With the right help, we are sure that we can fully complete this solution.

No partnerships at the moment

We do not have a business model at the moment

For financial aid we currently use our own money. In the future, we create some small projects to raise what we can and we will always seek financial help, as in this event, to be able to put this project into practice and in future others.

We hope that Solve will help us acquire the necessary funding to put our idea to work, as well as seek more and more knowledge for this project and other great projects that we seek to do to help improve the world.

Detalhes

We do not have names of organizations in mind, but we consider any kind of aid, mainly technological, financial and knowledge.

We will use this award to research and seek the required knowledge and, finally, we will begin to design the ideal A.I. for our application.

Detalhes

We will use this award to research and seek the required knowledge and, finally, we will begin to design the ideal A.I. for our application.