Interactive visual systems to improve children's stay in hospitals

Experts in engineering and digital design, audiovisual systems and child psychology, inter alia, have added their knowledge to make the stay of hospitalized children more enjoyable, with the development of a large curved interactive screen with which they can interact with the scenes and special effects it offers.

Technology is contributing enormously not only to improving health, but to make the stay of hospitalized patients emotionally more comfortable and bearable.. There have been many success stories analyzed in Digital AV Magazine in this regard, in which the new audiovisual systems, Tactile and interactive devices offer their technological contribution to improve patient recovery, especially the little ones.

One of them has been the collaboration carried out between experts in digital design, sistemas AV, child medicine and psychology to improve the environment for children and families at Boston Children's Hospital (EU) with the development of a giant interactive screen located in the entrance hall of the pediatric center.

The project, coordinated by a team of researchers led by Tim Hunter, professor and researcher of the department UConn Digital & Media Design from the University of Connecticut (better known as UConn), It is based on a screen with HD resolution (out of 5.5×7,3 metros) and slightly curved that surrounds this space, to which Kinect technology has been incorporated Microsoft so that little ones can interact with their movements.

One of the challenges of this project that began in 2012 and it was launched a few months ago, as Samantha Olschan points out, professor in the Hunter department, “It was the design of the screen itself and the scale that we had to develop, since it was about encouraging the participation of the children and not that the dimensions of it scared them and they could not carry out activities”.

For this, the team has developed nine interactive children's scenes, creative and therapeutic, that are combined with special effects that are activated with the movement of children in front of the screen so that they participate and play with it.

The system integrates thirteen Kinect sensors (in the version 2 de Kinect para Windows) and seven optical cameras, that provide data on the movements and gestures of the participants, that are activated by the circulation and presence of people, up to twelve, that pass in front of the screen.

As Tim Hunter explains, “The idea was to empower children emotionally and physically to take control of the scenes on the screen, in a space and time when they are not in their normal routine. So, with a simple gesture of the hands, They can rearrange the stars in the sky or move the leaves of a garden; or when they move in front of the screen, An avatar appears that follows them and interacts with them”.

In the development of this process “the collaboration and experience of the members of the hospital, experts in child psychology and human behavior, as well as UConn Digital faculty & Media Design has been fundamental to achieve this challenge with children, since these types of projects are not usually assigned to an academic institution like ours. Thanks to this research collaboration, the team has been able to focus not only on the technical solution, but in increasing and humanizing the user experience and that technology, very complex, be invisible to the rest and seem to work magic”, subraya Hunter.

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