Tweets for toddlers who want to Twitter with new Twoddler toy

December 5, 2009 by Shawn Douglas
Filed under: News, Product News

Toddlers may soon be able to interact with Twitter using a new toy called the Twoddler.

In the search to keep toddlers ahead of the rest of the competitive world, many parents will introduce communication tools and techniques to their babies at very early ages. Now thanks to research out of Hasselt University in Belgium, parents may soon be able to add social networking to their babies’ repertoire with the Twoddler.

Modifying a Fisher Price Activity Center, the team added functionality that allows a baby to send a signal to a sensor by interacting with the toy, which relays a signal to a related computer. That computer translates the signal into a human-readable component and posts it to the baby’s Twitter account.

The researchers give an example: “Yorin plays with mommy’s picture for over 3 minutes, a twitter message will be posted saying ‘@mommy_yorin Yorin misses mommy and looks forward playing with her this evening’.”

The research team states on their Web site: “With Twoddler we hope to have created a platform for Twoddler communication and open opportunities to learn more about how we can support online presence of Toddlers for their parents. Presence information is based on simple, playful and non-intrusive activity recognition.”

The team submitted their idea to the Innovative and Creative Applications (INCA) 2009 competition, winning first place. The judges said of the Twoddler: “A good, well implemented idea, with a lot of potential. It allows people/children that are not capable of verbal communication to communicate through an inventive combination of hardware and software. It is this potential that we wanted to reward.”

At this time, it’s not clear if the research team plans to further develop the toy idea to bring it to market. For more information about the Twoddler, please visit the researchers’ site.