Gamifying Household Chores With Face Recognition and a BMO Companion
A family task manager that recognizes kids at a kiosk, runs a points-and-rewards economy, and wraps it all in an animated BMO character.
BMO Chore Helper is a gamified task manager for families. It turns the daily grind of household chores into something kids actually walk up to, using facial recognition, a full points-and-rewards economy, and an animated BMO character from Adventure Time who cheers people on and speaks with a custom text-to-speech voice.
Meeting kids where they are
The design premise is that friction kills family systems. If completing a chore requires logging in, the kids will not do it. So recognition happens automatically at a dedicated kiosk: a child or parent walks up and BMO knows who they are. From there the character provides encouragement and feedback in its own voice, which is the part that makes the thing feel like a companion instead of a spreadsheet.
The kiosk itself runs on an interesting pairing, a Nintendo Switch alongside Ubuntu, with a parent dashboard on the web and a kid-facing app delivered as a mobile PWA. Three surfaces, three audiences, one shared task system underneath.
A real task and rewards engine
Under the playful skin is a genuinely complete task model. Tasks can be assigned to specific people, rotated automatically by whose day it is, set to recur daily or on chosen weekdays, or left open for anyone to claim. Completing a task can require photo proof, and parents run an approval workflow to award points. Both kids and parents earn points, spend them against a custom reward catalog, and every transaction is captured in a full audit trail. That last detail matters more than it sounds: in a family, "who earned what" is exactly the kind of dispute a transaction history quietly settles.
Personalization as a feature, not a footnote
The part I underestimated at first was configurability. The app ships with 117 pre-made avatar icons and 56 personal backgrounds with adjustable dimming, and it lets you rename essentially every concept in the system. Family can become Household or Team, Kid can become Member or Roommate or Employee, Chores can become Missions or Quests or Jobs. That reskinning is what lets the same engine serve a household of young kids and, with different words, a shared apartment of adults.
The takeaway I carry from this build is that the game layer and the ledger layer have to be equally serious. The BMO character and the voice are what get a kid to the kiosk, but it is the rotation logic, the approval workflow, and the audit trail that keep the whole thing trustworthy enough for parents to actually run it.
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