The robot that staves off loneliness for chronically ill children

As a rule of thumb, the best ideas are the simplest. That's easy to forget in an age of rapid technological innovation, when the tendency is to be led by capability rather than need. For as Karen Dolva, co-founder of the Norwegian startup No Isolation, says: "There are a lot of engineers who don't want to make something useful – they want to make something cool." Dolva, a 26-year-old who studied computer science and interaction design at Oslo University, is not one of them. She and her two co-founders – Marius Aabel and Matias Doyle – are all about utility.