Heartie, a smart companion platform for children with heart conditions, has officially won two Red Dot Design Awards, one in the Apps category and one in the Interface & User Experience Design category. These twin accolades from the internationally renowned Red Dot Design Award jury recognize Heartie's innovative healthcare technology and child-centered design.
The Red Dot Design Award is one of the world’s most influential international design competitions, with origins dating back to the mid-1950s. Founded in Germany and now spanning three distinct disciplines—Product Design, Brands & Communication Design, and Design Concept—the award recognizes outstanding work across industries and media. Each year, an independent, international jury of experts convenes to assess submissions from around the globe, making Red Dot not only a barometer of contemporary design quality but also one of the largest competitions of its kind
At the heart of the program is the Red Dot label, an internationally established mark of excellence that winners may use to signal superior design quality in the market. Recognition extends beyond the certificate: award-winning projects are showcased through yearbooks, online profiles, and exhibitions in the Red Dot Design Museums in Essen, Singapore, and Xiamen, ensuring global visibility for designers and brands alike. This ecosystem, rigorous adjudication, a respected quality seal, and enduring public presentation have helped Red Dot to establish what “good design” means in practice.
Over seven decades, Red Dot has evolved into a cultural institution that both reflects and propels the state of the art in design. By uniting diverse perspectives on its juries and by spotlighting innovation through its museums and media channels, the award shapes discourse across sectors, from consumer electronics and healthcare to mobility, packaging, and digital experiences, while giving designers a globally recognized platform to demonstrate impact.
Heartie's award-winning concept is a smart health companion created especially for children aged 8–14 with heart conditions. The system combines a wearable ECG monitoring patch – changed every 14 days – with an interactive app ecosystem spanning multiple devices. Young patients bond with a friendly Heartie character through a tablet or kid-friendly smartwatch, embarking on an interstellar adventure across culturally themed virtual planets filled with interactive homes and mini-games. These playful experiences are carefully gamified to teach self-care, nutrition, heart anatomy, and emotional regulation in an age-appropriate way, turning health education into engaging exploration.
To further support each child's emotional well-being, Heartie features a guided digital diary powered by an AI companion – an "emotionally intelligent" journaling tool that helps kids articulate their feelings and log symptoms in a fun, supportive manner. At the same time, parents stay connected through a dedicated mobile dashboard: they can monitor real-time heart data, receive emergency alerts, and export structured reports for doctors, ensuring they are informed and involved at every step. This emotionally intelligent solution masterfully blends healthcare monitoring with playful design elements; by uniting storytelling, gamification, emotional support and biometric tracking, Heartie bridges the gap between clinical monitoring and everyday care. The end result is a compassionate tech ecosystem that not only safeguards children's health but also makes the journey less scary and more empowering for the whole family.
Heartie’s creation stems from the close collaboration of Keqing (Clara) Jiao and Huiyang (Sherry) Chen, both credited as Product Designers and co-creators. Jiao brings an equally international lens. Educated in Architectural Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong with first-class honors (top 5%), she earned scholarships for study at UC Berkeley and a research tour across Italy and France, later deepening her HCI focus during a master’s at Carnegie Mellon. Professionally, she serves as a UX Designer at Motorola Solutions, leading design for mission-critical configuration apps and portals in the public-safety domain; outside of work, her side project Hive AI has earned multiple international design honors and she co-founded an HCI podcast featuring designers and researchers from leading companies and universities. On Heartie, Jiao co-led end-to-end product design and systems thinking—shaping the game-based learning loops, journaling flow, and parent dashboards—so that clinical monitoring, education, and emotional support form a single, child-first experience.
Chen trained in BFA Product Design at Parsons, where early research in healthcare and human factors led her toward UX for wellbeing. In industry she has led UI/UX on a mental-wellness app that lifted onboarding conversion by roughly 60% and reached more than 2,000 weekly active users within two weeks of launch, and she helped design an enterprise, AI-driven healthcare SaaS platform that improved task-completion rates and professional event participation. Now pursuing an M.S. in Human–Computer Interaction at the University of Michigan, she directed Heartie’s interface language, interactive character and animations, and the product demo; drawing on her industrial-prototyping background, she also produced the hardware renderings for the ECG container, patches, and usage scenarios. Together, Jiao and Chen exemplify a new generation of healthcare-focused product designers who pair rigorous UX and system design with empathy, turning pediatric care into an experience that is as emotionally intelligent and playful as it is medically purposeful.
"Heartie began as a labor of love to help children feel brave in their health journey," said Chen, Heartie's co-creator and product designer. "We imagined a companion that could turn medical routines into playful adventures. To have that vision honored with two Red Dot awards is incredibly humbling – it affirms that empathy-driven design can truly resonate on a global stage."
"For us, winning Red Dot is more than an accolade; it's a validation of putting human feelings at the center of healthcare technology," said Jiao, Heartie's co-creator. "We were inspired by the resilience of young patients and the devotion of their families. Seeing Heartie celebrated internationally reinforces our belief that innovation and compassion must go hand in hand in designing for the future of care."
Heartie's Red Dot triumph signals a broader significance beyond this project alone. Its recognition on the world stage highlights a rising demand for innovations that not only advance monitoring and treatment but also nurture empathy, understanding, and emotional well-being. As the Red Dot Awards have shown this year, the designs that will define tomorrow are those that marry technical excellence with a profoundly human touch – and Heartie's success is a shining example of this transformative trend.
This article was written in cooperation with Jack Hansen