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.
Many faces of Buddy (created with Sketch app)
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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