Body Scan Kids: Healthy Habits

Six friendly scans of your child's pretend body: tummy, eyes, nose, teeth and both hands. Each gets better when they eat well, brush, wash and blow their nose.

Body Scan Kids turns looking after yourself into something a small child can actually see.

Your child taps their tummy, and a scan appears. It is not a photograph and it is not a measurement: it is a picture the app draws from what a grown-up logged that day. Eat a plate of vegetables and the picture clears. Skip the vegetables and it does not.

That is the whole idea. A four-year-old cannot be argued into eating broccoli. They can be shown what it does.

SIX THINGS TO LOOK AT • Tummy: an ultrasound of what is in there, with the food they actually ate floating in it • Eyes: how tired they are after a long afternoon of screens • Nose: whether it wants blowing, which children find extremely funny • Teeth: what is sitting on them since the last brush • Hands: one scan each, under a lamp that shows what a day of touching everything leaves behind

EVERY SCAN HAS AN ANSWER Each one comes with one small thing to do, and only ever one at a time. Brush. Wash. Drink some water. Eat something green. Do it, scan again, and watch the picture change: the app shows the before and the after side by side, so the change is the reward.

FOOD YOUR FAMILY ACTUALLY EATS Fifty-nine foods, twenty-eight of them Vietnamese: phở, cơm tấm, bánh mì, chả giò, canh chua, xôi, chè, thanh long. Browse by food group or by cuisine. Photographs, not cartoons, so a child recognises what they had for lunch.

GROWN-UPS ARE IN CHARGE Nothing that changes a picture can be reached by a child. Logging food, undoing a mistake, and setting how the teeth or the hands look all sit behind a grown-up gate. Once a grown-up has opened it, the child still does the tapping, which is the part they enjoy and the part that gets them invested in the result.

Each child in the family gets their own body and their own day.

PRIVATE, COMPLETELY No account. No sign-in. No advertising. No analytics. No in-app purchases, no links out of the app, and no networking code in it at all. Everything stays on your iPhone.

ABOUT THE PICTURES The app does not scan, measure or diagnose anything. Your phone has no way of seeing inside your child, and this app does not pretend otherwise: every picture is drawn from what you logged, and the app works exactly the same with the camera off, because it never uses the camera. It is a way of making a habit visible to someone too young to take your word for it.