As you might recall a couple of weeks ago Depaul UK launched an app to raise awareness for the plight of the homeless living on the streets across the country and there was a bit of a kerfuffle about how tasteful – or tasteless – the concept and naming of the app is.

Far from being outraged I was intrigued, and so downloaded the much maligned iHobo app and set about supplying my red-hoodied friend with a rather natty purple sleeping bag and what appears to be a sandwich from Prêt. Aside from the risks of belittling the homeless by comparison to a Tamagotchi it was so far so good – I could feel my awareness rising by the minute; with text alerts popping up on my phone asking me for help in dealing with the problems of life on the street.

Within the day, however, disaster struck. I missed one of my iHobo’s alert notices and failed to give him attention when he needed it most – the upshot of this being that a shady character offered him drugs, which he accepted. This was the beginning of a downward spiral that ended in my iHobo OD’ing on pills and vodka in the street.

Clearly, this was my fault and I pledged to do better next time. I reloaded the little scamp and tried to keep better care of him. He didn’t fair much better this time, I slept through some alerts and he became addicted to smack – refusing my offers of food and sleeping bags; only accepting cash with which to feed his addiction.

On my third hapless iHobo, I discovered a problem. It wasn’t that I was missing the alerts, it was that the app was failing to produce them. The only knowledge I had of his plaintive cries for help were messages in the app chastising me for being absent – by which time it was too late to do anything.

The more I played with the iHobo, the more my negative stereotypes were reinforced. It seemed that every iHobo was the same – beyond help and on a downward spiral to his untimely demise, with little I could do to help.

So after my initial positive feeling about the iHobo – it certainly raised my awareness of the dangers and the emotional and physical stresses that come with living on the street – poor implementation of the application has meant that it has back-fired and reinforced a negative stereotype of homeless people.

I still think the concept is great, but the poor execution has completely neutralised any good it might have done. If the alerts worked and if it was actually possible to recover the iHobo from a negative state then perhaps Depaul UK might stand a chance of changing more people’s perspectives on the homeless.