Project Description:

CS 92 Revised Project Description as of 2-26-99

Location: Hasbro Children's Hospital

Teacher: Susan Cicchini

Social Workers: Linda Goodale and Sandy Daigneau

Student Creators: Oliver Hurst-Hiller, Rupali Kotwal, Yusuke Naito, and Naomi Ture

Children who are awaiting trips to the operating room at the Hasbro Children's Hospital are often anxious about it. The children may be scared by their pending procedure and unfamiliar with the hospital environment. While the social workers spend as much time as possible to help children (and their parents and siblings) prepare psychologically for their hospital experiences, they do not have the time to prepare every child one-on-one for every medical procedure. Due to time constraints and resource limitations, out-patients in particular do not receive as much personalized attention as the social workers would ideally like them to have. To this end, the hospital currently provides patients with a video walk-through of the O.R. experience, a picture book that details the O.R. environment, and a PlayStation video game system and toys for relaxation and distraction.

In the pre-operative waiting room and Ms. Cicchini's in-patient classroom there are several IBM Aptiva Pentium computers running Windows 95 with 16 Mb of RAM and CD-ROM drives. We will design an application to run on these computers that will help familiarize and educate patients about the hospital environment, personnel, equipment, and common procedures (tests and operations). Hasbro's patients are ages 0 to 18, and to ensure that our application is accessible to this broad audience, our coordinating social workers have suggested that we design it based on a 6th grade level. Our goal is to make the application's interface simple enough for younger patients to use while sophisticated enough to educate older patients, parents, and siblings. At present, we plan to integrate audio, video, animation, and straightforward text in an entertaining and educational multimedia application.