Pediatric Pal

Inspiration

Many children aren’t equipped to express their feelings and concerns about their own medical care. As a result, many procedures, such as vaccines, can create uncomfortable situations for many children. Our goal is to expand the scope of self-care to pediatric patients through a friendly and non-confrontational method known as medical play.

What it does

Medical play can diffuse many negative emotions in regards to a hospital setting by encouraging playing, which is familiar and comforting in new situations.

The goal of our application is the digitize medical play so every pediatric patient can:

• become familiar with medical items in a non-threatening setting
• learn about the purpose of medical items
• practice coping with hospital stays or procedures
• feel in control in a pretend medical setting
• and express feelings about health care experiences with an adult

How we built it

The application was built with the Unity engine and C#. This allowed us to build a cross platform experience which is accessible to every child on any device of their choosing.

Platforms include:

• IOS
• Android
• Microsoft Phone
• Mac
• Windows PC

Challenges we ran into

We faced many conceptual challenges in regards to simplifying the purpose of medical instruments and procedures for any child to understand.

We also faced a number of technical issues including animating the game characters to carry out basic interactions with the patient.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re particularly excited about the level of interaction we were able to implement. Not only are we reinforcing basic medical play principles but also gamifying the process which is a fresh, modern take on the classic pediatric method.

What's next for Pediatric Pal

Pediatric Pal presents a unique opportunity to involve children in their own medical care. Gamifying medical play also present a number of exciting avenues for the application to go down. Our hope is to make its basic functionality available on any and every platform available. Future improvement could also include neural-network trained characters and thousands of medical procedures and instruments interactions for children suffering from a variety of conditions.

Built With

• c#
• reallusion
• unity