Inspiration
Anxiety for the hospitalized child is a major challenge. It can interfere with treatment, lead to longer rehabilitation and healing times, use of more sedatives than necessary, and even intensify the experience of pain.
Being hospitalized at any age, for any reason, is a daunting experience. But perhaps worst of all for a child. They won't understand what's happening to their body, or why they keep getting moved from room to room. They'll be scared by the overbearing beeping and grinding machines. They'll be confused by why such nice people nevertheless keep causing them pain with procedures.
For the chronically or critically ill child, things as simple as PT or as devastating as having dressings on third degree burns changed can all provoke anxiety. These things are critical to recovery and happen frequently.
Instead of disorienting and potentially toxic sedatives and narcotics, simple and straightforward therapies exist that can dramatically decrease procedure-oriented anxiety and thus improve pain and quality of life.
Unfortunately, challenges exist to delivery. There aren't enough therapists in the hospital setting and they frequently can't operate in an on-demand fashion even when on staff. And nurses and other bedside caregivers have competing obligations even if they could get the training to deliver them.
What it does
Because these interventions are straightforward, we aim to deliver them in a simple app, making them available on demand, cost effective, and more widely reaching for far more children. This app is called "Gator P.A.L." and P.A.L stands for Patient Assessment Level due to the apps function of monitoring patient fear levels before and after a procedure.
Education and enlightenment: Simply understanding the procedure, what's happening and why, can reduce the anticipatory fear. Our app will start here, offering a body map with procedures indexed to location. Touch the elbow to learn about a PICC line. Or the chest to learn about chest tubes.
How we built it
We used the xcode platform using the language Swift.
Challenges we ran into
Nobody on the team knew Swift, so we all had to learn this program to complete the application.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
By the end of the project, all team members were very efficient in Swift. We also received approval from Dr. Rao (UF Health Pediatric Psychologist) to move forward with launching this app on the apple store and to start implementation of the app in the hospital to compliment treatment.
What we learned
All team members came in with no experience in coding in Swift. Most of our mobile app development experience deals C++ using the cocos2d-x libraries. We decided to use Swift instead, to broaden our skill set. We also learned to be very patient when dealing with issues with our code and not to get very upset at the small bugs.
What's next for Gator P.A.L.
This intervention has the potential for dramatic and measurable improvements in pediatric patient outcomes. Faster recovery times, less sedation, and higher quality of life. We hope to launch this application after SwampHacks and to perform a research study on how effective it really is in decreasing the need for medication for patients in the Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Unit.
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