How Child-Centered Design Could Change Hospital Care

Three Hongik University students turned the hospital intravenous (IV) pole into a sailboat children can ride, the web magazine IDEAS FOR GOOD reported on September 8, 2026, while hospitals still hand children adult-sized stands.

The design raises a question for the whole medical device field: should children's equipment shrink an adult product, or start from how children actually behave?

The students, Won Dabin, Kim Hyunmin, and Seo Jaewoo, named their design Ringo and gave it a seat so a young patient can sit and ride through the ward.

Children still use adult IV stands, whose poles stand too tall, whose lines tangle, and whose wide bases trip small feet, the project's page at iF Design explains.

Even tethered to a drip, children keep moving, and they often pull or climb the pole, which rattles parents and medical staff.

Ringo won the iF Design Student Award, whose jury praised the sailboat form for sparking imagination while calming parents, doctors, and nurses.

The project had already taken Silver at the 2025 Spark Design Awards, where entry records list how the boat actually works.

A motor moves the boat at up to three kilometers per hour, about walking pace, once the child presses a GO button on the handle.

Four obstacle-detecting sensors and a front camera scan the path, and a parent carries a remote control that can stop the boat in an emergency.

A sail-shaped holder carries the drip bag, and a groove in the frame guides the line away from wheels and feet.

Neither the award pages nor the magazine reports whether any hospital has ordered Ringo or what it would cost.

Ringo lands on a problem far bigger than one pole: hospitals routinely fit children with devices designed around adult bodies and adult behavior.

Children, parents, and nurses once graded a redesigned IV pole on mobility, safety, looks, and function for a 2019 study in the Journal of Child Health Care.

The children valued different design features than the adults did, and the authors urged manufacturers to bring children into the design of products made for them.

In May 2026, Frontiers in Medicine published a paper arguing that developers should build health technology for young patients together with those patients and their families.

The authors, led by Jennifer Preston, call the approach co-creation, meaning children and families help shape a device from the first sketches instead of testing a finished one.

One case study in the paper gathered 19 young people, aged 12 to 22, to help design a device from the start.

Early input like that improves how usable and acceptable a device feels and surfaces risks that adult designers would not spot, the authors reported.

In April 2025, the journal BMC Pediatrics published a study of 188 children at a children's hospital in Hangzhou, China, tying ward design to how scared children feel.

Fear scores stayed low for 76.74% of children in wards decorated with cartoons, against 51.43% of children in plain wards.

Their parents reported higher satisfaction too, and the same study found that merely seeing needles or sharp instruments more than doubled a child's odds of high fear.

Ringo folds those findings into hardware, wrapping the drip pole in a playful shape and handing the child control of their own movement.

From award juries to medical journals, the push now runs the same way: design that treats a child's movement, play, and feelings as part of care rather than a problem to manage.