Bounce Works
Can an app help children cope with the loss of a parent? A small British firm is sure that it can
We meet the Northampton-based social enterprise that has developed an app, called Apart of Me, designed to help children cope with the loss of a parent.
No parent should ever have to bury a child, as the saying goes, but what about the child that has to cope with the death of a parent? On average, one child in every school class will have lost a parent and no two children will deal with the loss in the same way.
Getting children to discuss their emotions after the death of a parent can be difficult, especially with a family dealing with their own grief around them. The child may feel they don’t want to make the surviving parent even more unhappy by discussing their feelings, for example.
Bounce Works aims to tackle this problem in the form of an app. Described as an “emotional support system”, the
Apart of Me app aims to help families talk about death by placing the child in a virtual world that encourages them to explore their feelings and share them with people in the real world. It launches this autumn and we caught up with one of the two co-founders at the BT Tech4Good Awards to find out more about the app that everyone hopes they will never have to use.
Help in the hospice
An app like Apart of Me doesn’t just come from a flash of inspiration. Bounce Works co-founder Louis Weinstock was working as a family psychotherapist in a hospice, helping the children of parents with a terminal illness, when the idea germinated. “Louis was approached by the hospice to look into digital approaches to bereavement counselling,” said Ben Page, the company’s other co-founder. “Often young people are hard to reach in that situation, not surprisingly, and digital seemed to be a good avenue to reaching them.” Page, with almost 20 years of software development experience, decided to lend his technical expertise. Page and Weinstock ran some focus groups with families, looking at the existing apps and tools that were designed to help children cope with bereavement, but they weren’t landing. “Their feedback was pretty much ‘we wouldn’t use that, we’d be doing other things on our phone’. One of those things was gaming, and so it seemed obvious we should approach it using gaming technology.”
Bounce Works won a grant from the Nominet Trust to develop Apart of Me, and then engaged the services of a professional games developer to design the app. “It’s a virtual environment on the young person’s mobile phone that they can enter whenever they want to help them process their grief and understand their emotions,” explained Page.
“The aim is to take some of the real-world consulting techniques that Louis is using in the consulting room and produce a digital version.”
An island of their own
Apart of Me takes the form of a virtual private island, a place the child can visit to be alone with their thoughts. There’s no online interaction or parental/carer supervision – no sense that the child is being watched or observed.
“When you arrive, you’re met by a guide who welcomes you and introduces themselves as someone who’s been through a difficult situation in the past and who can guide the young person on their journey,” said Page.
The game takes the form of a 3D adventure that challenges the player to take on various quests. The quests help the player understand life and death and how to cope with their own emotions. Far from encouraging the child to bottle up their emotions or confine their communication to their virtual guide, the quests also include real-world challenges, such as ‘talk to someone who knew your father and find out what their favourite movie was’. In the longer term, Page wants to add a ‘digital memory box’ to the game, so that players can store photos, audio or video of their parent.
“One of the problems anyone has when they’re going through grief is accepting their own emotions and understanding that whatever they’re going through is okay, and they’re not alone in feeling those things and other people have been in similar situations,” said Page. Indeed, there’s a section of the island where players can listen to the stories of other young people who have suffered a bereavement.
“There’s an educational element to it – learning about different emotions and coping strategies if you’re overwhelmed by those emotions.”
Measuring the response
Apart of Me has no direct output – there’s no reporting of the child’s progress or how far they’ve got through their journey. Nobody wants the player to feel like they’re being evaluated or that they have to hit certain targets. It’s not an exam.
However, without any direct means of seeing how players are interacting with the game or progressing through its different quests, it’s harder for the design team to see how improvements can be made. This isn’t the kind of app that you can run past randomly selected focus groups, because children who haven’t suffered the loss of a parent won’t have the same emotional attachment to the journey. Needless to say, recruiting recently bereaved children to test an app isn’t appropriate, either, so the team had to strike a delicate balance when it came to getting feedback.
“We had a prototype and we’ve evaluated it with a hundred young people and families, all of whom had been ‘youth advocates’ and people that Louis had worked with at the hospice,” said Page. “They’re maybe a bit further down the line than our target audience, but we obviously have to be careful about who we’re testing these prototypes on.” Of the 100 families who tested Apart of Me, around 80% said they would recommend it to a friend in a similar situation, said Page.
The ongoing challenge is to develop a way to evaluate whether the app helps improve the emotional wellbeing of the player. “We’re implementing a feature we’re calling the emotional check-in,” said Page. “Young people, every time they use the game, can record how they’re feeling. It’s a very simple journaling exercise.”
Gearing for launch
Apart of Me relied on grants and a crowdfunding campaign to provide it with enough money to launch the app. The company itself is a social enterprise – it’s not primarily driven to make a profit. Which is probably just as well, because the app is being given away for free in the app stores and – by its very nature – it’s targeting a niche audience. This is not going to become a mainstream hit. Promoting the app is also a challenge. Again, this isn’t the kind of app that would necessarily benefit from a mass marketing campaign, even if the company could afford one. Instead, it will be working with charities in the sector, such as Child Bereavement UK and Grief Encounter, to spread the word and reach the people that need the app most. “Social media is very helpful and there are good networks of people who are either supporting bereaved young people or who were bereaved young people themselves and can now really see the benefit of what we’re doing,” said Page. Bounce Works will need all the word-of-mouth and promotional support it can get, because there won’t be a huge PR department when the app drops in the stores this autumn. Bounce Works was formed by two people and remains just two people: Page and Weinstock. Yet, because of the nature of the app, Page has found that people are willing to chip in. “The nice thing is that because we’ve got a very compelling product, lots of people want to help us. We get very good rates and a lot of spare time from people, so we’re making good progress,” he said. And Apart of Me is just the first of a line of products the firm hopes to launch. “We’re really set up to investigate and explore how digital products can help emotional wellbeing in young people,” said Page.
There’s an educational element to it – learning about different emotions and coping strategies if you’re overwhelmed