Built with Rive
Rive Animations for a Personal Assistant to Motivate the Elderly
Vira Pogromska
Rive Animations for a Personal Assistant to Motivate the Elderly
I was drawn to this project because of its meaningful goal: supporting the elderly in their daily lives.
The app acts as a constant virtual companion, always present on the user’s mobile device, offering encouragement, motivation, and a friendly presence throughout the day.
Its purpose is to remind the person to perform daily routines and motivate them to live an active life.
By the time I joined the project, the virtual assistant character and a few basic animations had already been created.
My task was to transform the character in a way that would make him more cute and user friendly.
The challenge, however, was that I needed to do this through minimal changes.
The application was already in use by users, so the redesigned character had to be recognisable at a glance, its appearance should not create misunderstandings.
I also had to change the logic of the existing State Machine, create new animations and vector objects for them.
I solved the main task "to make the virtual assistant more cute" in two steps:
I used graphic possibilities to change the static image
I changed the animated behaviour of the character, its movements, making them more natural and less mechanical.
At the first stage I worked with colours, replacing the main blue colour of the character with a brighter and more cheerful shade, as well as adding shadows.
I also created new small facial elements, which in the animation stage allowed me to make the character's facial expressions more alive and natural.
Finally, I introduced a complimentary colour to the main colour in the image, which helped to achieve balance and cheerfulness.
Further shades of this complimentary colour I used in the creation of auxiliary objects of animation such as a cup, plate, toothbrush, book.
In this way I kept the basic concept of the project and made the character cute and user friendly with minimal changes in graphics.
In the next step, I used Rive app for the animation. Here I:
-) modified the existing animations of the character falling asleep and waking up by changing the facial expressions and making them look more natural
-) changed the wink animation
-) simplified the logic of the existing state machine by removing unnecessary complications from it
-) created new animations: eating, drinking, brushing teeth with classic and electric brushes, reading, and knocking
-) changed the state machine so that it could control all the animations created
I sincerely hope that this project will do a lot of good for people and I am very happy that I had the opportunity to be involved.
Here's a link to this project on my client's website: https://social-buddy.nl/
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Posted Oct 16, 2025
My constant virtual companion, always present on the user’s mobile device, offering encouragement, motivation, and a friendly presence throughout the day.
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Social Buddy
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