Monstas: The New Toys for Juvenile Arthritis

The unfortunate truth is that arthritis is not just a disease that affects old people. Even young children can develop these painful symptoms. There are a variety of different types of juvenile arthritis (JA), but there are no cures. One of the best remedies for children facing JA is repetitive exercises that help strengthen affected joints.

As many parents could probably guess, it can be difficult to get your kids to do things that can easily become frustrating and boring. This is a problem that designer Shirley Rodriguez is looking to solve with her new line of toys called Monstas. Their innovative designs will help children exercise their joints and stay engaged.

How Do the Monstas Work?

The new toys have a fairly simple purpose– help young JA patients perform all of their daily movements. It’s just they’re designed in a way that makes this routine process a whole lot more fun. Rodriguez had noticed a significant lack of options in this area and felt compelled to make great product that could help countless arthritic children.

Exercise is such an important aspect of long-term management, but most available products aren’t that inviting to children. This is perhaps most have been designed with adult arthritis patients in mind. Rodriguez wanted to make a great new product that actually fit in a child’s hands.

Check out this demo (low resolution) footage:

Where Did the Concept for Monstas Begin?

Monstas was originally going to be an activity book that would encourage kids to exercise their hands daily. As the idea was being fleshed out, it soon became clear that this thing would need to be much more reactive and responsive than a book in order to really motivate children living with arthritis. Thus, the final product became a digital exercise game and toys that’ll allow them to exercise their hands in a way that’s engaging and fun.

There are three types of exercises and three types of toys:

• The orange toy is used for finger squeeze routines
• The pink toy is used for knuckle presses
• The blue toy is used for wrist rotations

Rodriguez tested a variety of different models until she found the perfect design for the toys.

“The most challenging part of developing Monstas was trying to create natural fitting and efficient tools that would allow you to exercise specific joints. There were many prototypes which tried to move the chosen joints in different manners. For example, at some point there was a piano-like tool that would help strengthen the knuckles. That idea turned out to be a little awkward to use and was disregarded. The process of trying out different shapes, different materials and different ways of creating the same movement was time consuming but very rewarding,” explained Rodriguez.

Monstas aren’t available for purchase yet, but the concept has been nominated for several awards, including:

• The James Dyson Award
• The Spark Awards
• The Core77 Awards

Not only do we hope that these juvenile arthritis toys are available to buy soon, but we’d also like to see them in rheumatology clinics around the country. Rodriguez says she still has some streamlining to do before Monstas will be available to the JA community.