Games for Health 2006
At the Making Hospitals Fun session of the 2006 Games for Health conference, Ben Sawyer introduced three presenter groups that discussed their respective ongoing efforts to bring games into hospitals for the entertainment and education of patients that visit them. First to speak was a student group from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. Team members Philip Light, Patrick Mittereder, and Fred Gallart, working under mentorship from the ETC program, designed, prototyped, and installed in three participating hospital waiting rooms a touchscreen-based console with minigames and creative activities. Most popular among the activities was an interactive coloring book that allowed kids to create their own pictures and then ‘play’ them through an animation sequence. The group spent a sizable observation period monitoring children interacting with their prototyped software: a reported six major rounds of playtesting across three sites. Most of their modifications involved interface adjustments to make key features of the game more obvious to their young audience without resorting to large amounts of text. The final product was a roughly four foot high kiosk with a fiberglass shell and surface acoustic wave touchscreen. Adam Aronson from Arc Design designed a kid-friendly, “frog”-like shape for the kiosks, which were then fabricated by Interbots. The group believed that the full manufacturing cost of a kiosk would total $6000, and they are currently working on a commercialization plan. While satisfied with their product’s uptime and overall performance, they noted difficulties with parts delivery and communication of what was effectively a new concept to participating hospitals. One audience member asked if, given the hospital environment and high traffic nature of a waiting room game kiosk, the hospitals were concerned with sanitation; sanitation influenced the design of the fiberglass kiosk, which had no sharp edges and thus could be easily wiped down, but the group reported that hospital staff did not seem to be concerned with sterilization of the waiting room furniture.
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