Enhance and do not harm the health and wellbeing of all children, including through the use of inclusive design.

Wellbeing in digital innovation relies on design choices that enhance a child’s life satisfaction. These can include, for example, promoting a balanced lifestyle, emotional regulation and supportive social connections. Good design can also make mental and physical health and other forms of support easily accessible.

The principle of wellbeing draws together several children’s rights, including:¹⁵⁸

• Life, survival and development
• Recognition of the particular requirements of children with disabilities and their entitlement to special care and assistance
• Enabling children to access ‘the highest attainable standard’ of health, including services, treatments and rehabilitation
• Adequate standard of living and material assistance to support wellbeing
• Protection from substance abuse and forms of addiction.

Digital innovation that promotes children’s wellbeing encompasses diverse products and services, including games, social media and video streaming platforms. For innovation to promote children’s wellbeing, it should encourage a healthy and balanced lifestyle rather than feeding compulsion, unhealthy habits or harmful experiences.

“Before lockdown, because I was on my phone so much, I’d have a screentime thing, so my phone would lock at the end, if I had been on it for about, I think it was four hours a day.”

Child aged 12-13, Essex

“I think Youtube is good because I watch dance tutorials and acting challenges because I love those things.

Child aged 11-12, Yorkshire

Design cases

Data-driven technologies that automate decisions (e.g., algorithms, AI) can improve children’s social care and safeguarding decisions, provided care is taken to mitigate false positive or false negative results and bias in the datasets.¹⁵⁹

For children to reap the full benefits of wellbeing enhanced by digital technologies, innovators need to bake in privacy, safety and security in designing products and services and handling data about children. This means innovators should evaluate their design decisions and account for ‘the capabilities of the user population’ when anticipating the likely consequences for wellbeing.¹⁶⁰

“I want to never see … mean things or hacking because if someone gets… hurt, he wouldn’t play the game.

Child aged 7-8, Greater London

Security is essential to digital innovation in health and social care. The UK Department of Health and Social Care issued a code of conduct for data-driven health and care technology, recommending innovators to:

Make security integral to the design: keep systems safe by safeguarding data and integrating appropriate levels of security into the design of devices, applications and systems, keeping in mind relevant standards and guidance.¹⁶¹

For other digital products and services likely accessed by children, innovators should avoid design options that undermine children’s social relationships, disrupt healthy routines or manipulate their choices to their detriment.¹⁶²

Digital innovation for wellbeing recognises and accommodates special requirements of children with disabilities, promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. For example, children with disabilities describe opportunities for seeking information, communicating, learning, playing and socialising that are not possible in the non- digital world – visual explanations on YouTube, voice programmes on laptops, spell checks, online discussion groups otherwise inaccessible to them, and more.¹⁶³

To enhance children’s wellbeing, innovators should promote healthy and balanced lifestyles by providing easy access to health information and health and social services, encouraging active living (e.g., hybrid games that promote physical exercise) and offering creative opportunities (e.g., a sandbox game). Innovators should also refrain from deploying design features that cultivate compulsion (e.g., excessive gamification techniques), are detrimental to children’s relations with others, or are disruptive of a healthy routine.

“Thinking of the apps you use, what’s good and bad for wellbeing?

11-12 year olds, Yorkshire