Snappy

Inspiration

We kept coming back to one question: why do kids with chronic illnesses have to be scared every single time they go to the hospital? A child with leukemia goes through over 300 needle procedures during treatment. Kids with cerebral palsy, osteoporosis, sickle cell, they're in and out of hospitals every week for years. And the best we give them is a sticker and a cartoon on a tablet. That doesn't fix anything. We wanted to build something that actually stays with the child, something that makes every visit a little less scary than the last one.

What it does

Snappy is a personal robot companion that's with kids from the moment they walk into the hospital to the moment they leave. It works in three phases.

Play: Before the procedure, kids put on a VR headset and play a game where they rescue Snappy from danger. This flips the whole dynamic. Instead of being the scared patient, they're the hero. It burns off anxiety and gives them something to feel good about before anything medical even happens.

Support: During the procedure, Snappy shows up in AR right next to them. Snappy talks them through what's happening in simple language, does breathing exercises with them, and keeps them company through the scary parts. It's not just distraction. Snappy is actually explaining the procedure in a way a 7 year old can understand.

Understand: After the visit, the family scans a QR code on their paperwork and Snappy walks them through the results. Instead of confusing medical jargon that means nothing to a kid, Snappy turns it into language they can actually make sense of. White blood cells become tiny soldiers. A rising count means your army is growing. Kids go from being confused and scared to actually understanding what's going on in their own body, becoming more compliant with future procedures since they now understand what's going on.

The key thing is that Snappy remembers. It's not a one time thing. Visit 1, Snappy is a new friend. Visit 10, Snappy greets them by name and remembers their favorite game. Visit 50, Snappy celebrates their progress with them. Every visit builds on the last.

How we built it

We split the experience across two platforms. The first part, everything from when the kid enters the hospital up until the procedure room, we built as a VR experience on Meta Quest using Unity. That covers the rescue game where kids save Snappy and the whole pre-procedure experience. For the companion chatbot version where Snappy talks kids through the actual procedure, we built that on Snap Spectacles using Lens Studio. This lets Snappy show up in AR in the real room with the child during the scary parts without needing a full VR headset.

Challenges we ran into

The VR side was tricky because we wanted kids to have a mixed reality experience where they're shooting germs in the actual hospital around them, not some virtual world. But that means no controllers. Getting a reliable shooting mechanism working with just hand tracking took a lot of trial and error. Kids move their hands unpredictably and we had to make it feel responsive and fun without any physical buttons to press. On the Snap Spectacles side, the platform has really limited modules to work with. Getting the chatbot to actually function properly within those constraints was painful. We went through a million iterations just to get Snappy's chat interface working, and then getting Snappy to stay in frame and hold position in the real world so it didn't drift or jump around every time the kid moved their head was a whole other battle.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a complete three phase experience that covers the entire hospital visit, not just one moment, all in less than 48 hours. Most solutions in this space are single point distractions. Snappy is a continuous companion across the whole journey. We're also proud of the report translation system. Watching a kid actually understand their own medical results and feel good about it instead of scared is exactly what we set out to build. And honestly, Snappy as a character just works. People connect with it immediately.

What we learned

We learned that the recurring nature of the problem is what matters most. It's not about making one visit better. It's about making visit number 47 better than visit number 46. That's why memory and continuity became the core of everything we built. We also learned that kids don't need to be distracted from medical procedures. They need to understand them. When a child knows what's happening and why, the fear drops dramatically. Distraction is a band-aid. Understanding is a real solution.

What's next for Snappy

We want to expand Snappy beyond blood draws to cover MRIs, chemotherapy sessions, physical therapy, spinal taps, and other procedures that chronic illness kids go through regularly. We want to pilot with a children's hospital to test Snappy in real clinical settings and measure the impact on anxiety levels and procedure compliance. Long term, Snappy should be the standard companion for every chronically ill child. Every kid walking into a hospital deserves someone who's always there.