Safety Rex from Boston Children's Hospital

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  Intro

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  Topics

Inspiration

Boston Children’s Hospital Injury Prevention Program (https://www.childrenshospital.org/centers-and-services/programs/f-_-n/injury-prevention-program) aims to decrease common but tragic childhood injuries through public education and dissemination of injury prevention materials. About 90% of childhood injuries are preventable so educating families and kids about safe behaviors in everyday life is the key to keeping kids out of the hospital.

This program at Boston Children’s operates a physical, staffed on-premise “Safety Store” to educate families about injury prevention and to distribute at-cost safety products like bike helmets, window guards and smoke detectors. In order to keep the materials at a low-cost, the Safety Store is manned by college interns eager to engage children and their parents in the main lobby of the hospital. Our engagement efforts, however, have been limited by the availability of staff and our program has realized there are people we are not reaching when the store is closed.

We are developing Safety Rex as an always-available, freestanding, unstaffed source of trusted injury prevention information with the ability to order safety products through online stores like Amazon. This application will allow the Injury Prevention Program to educate and suggest resources for anyone, at any time.

What it does

Safety Rex Alexa Skill aims to engage with kids and families to educate them about safety and to teach them simple injury prevention practices at home, car, school or play. It covers areas like biking, playground, road safety, fire prevention, safety from poison and safety at home. It may be expanded to include new injury topics, such as texting while driving, as they arise. The Safety Rex is designed as a companion, interacting with kids as if Alexa were their friend. Within the program, Alexa suggests videos on topics such as “how to fit a helmet”, and allows the user to play trivia games to test their knowledge about any injury prevention topic. Through the dynamic interactions, users will engage with Alexa to teach them something new about safety.

How I built it

The Injury Prevention team is working with the Innovation and Digital Health team at Boston Children’s Hospital to leverage digital tech in expanding safety education. As we explore interactive and hands free capabilities to design an immersive experience the growing presence of digital assistants presents a great opportunity to scale the solution.

We chose to leverage Alexa’s growing abilities to seamlessly engage families and kids in a variety of settings and with the new technical capabilities of Alexa for Business enabled us to build an engaging multi-modal experience for the end users.

Challenges I ran into

A key challenge for building the solution was to build out a fun and engaging experience for kids that can sustain their attention and something they want to engage again later. Our team worked closely with the clinical team to understand various safety aspects we educate families on and build out various experiences to engage the users. We built out user experience flows and tested in a small team with parent and kids input to inform the design of the voice and screen interactions.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Our multi-disciplinary team of clinical and technical members worked closely to strategize and put together a vision for Safety Rex and the safety education we wanted to incorporate that is useful for kids and families. Our team was able to quickly learn the capabilities of Alexa Presentation Language to start building an engaging experience.

What I learned

Working on the initial iteration of Safety Rex we realize the need for it be comprehensive as well the value of building out usage flows for an engaging experience. Also we realized the need to digitize some education content in a manner that will be applicable for an interactive voice / visual experience.

What's next for Safety Rex

Our vision for Safety Rex is to be a trusted source for educating on kids safety topics. Families and Kids will be able interact with the education content provided at any time in their home or other settings such as malls and medical waiting rooms and become more aware of the best practices. We plan to continue the engagement with new updates, trivia and games across multiple areas. We are releasing the initial iteration of the skill with bike safety content and plan to build out the other areas in the next month and release those.

The Injury Prevention team at Boston Children’s Hospital will be packaging Safety Rex with Echo Show and mounted big displays along with other props to have an interactive exhibit as a companion to the physical Safety Store at the hospital. In addition the team believes that clinical providers have a big role to play be engaging their community in educating around safety education. Ability to scale Safety Rex via Alexa digital assistant and platform will enable us to partner with various pediatric clinical providers across the country to offer injury prevention education in an engaging manner to their patients. Pediatric health care providers will be able to leverage the skill with the Safety Rex deployment across the country to have an interactive on-premise exhibit available to their community.

Built With

• alexa-skills-kit
• javascript
• node.js