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Digital signage and wonder: 50-foot video wall brings adventure to children's hospital

A Delaware children's hospital today opens up its "Discovery Zone," a 50-foot-wide digital signage video wall featuring gesture interaction for its young patients.

September 18, 2014 by Christopher Hall — w, t

Unless someone's having a baby, a trip to the hospital is rarely a joyous or fun occasion — especially if you're a child; doubly so if you're a child and the patient.

So when Nemours Children's Health System recently undertook a $270 million renovation and expansion of its Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Delaware, it paid special attention to the experience of its young patients.

And when chemicals titan DuPont — more fully, the E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. — came to Nemours Children's Health with a generous donation and a very specific challenge, the stage was set to bring a very special interactive digital signage experience to the hospital's youthful patients.

According to pediatrician Dr. Neil Izenberg, the chief executive of the Nemours Center for Children’s Health Media, the donation and challenge was to "create something spectacular in this soaring new atrium that would bring joy to kids and a little fun and a big wow factor."

Opening today as part of the ongoing expansion, the hospital's new "Discovery Zone" is a 50-foot-wide by 9-foot-high video wall featuring Microsoft Kinect gesture interaction technology that will allow up to 30 children (and adults) to interact with the on-screen landscape, flora and fauna.

"Actually we expect that, contrary to the usual feelings about a hospital, kids are going to really love being here," Izenberg said in a recent interview. "And we just hope we can tear them away so they can go to their doctor's appointments."

The Discovery Zone was designed by Kinesis Studio of San Francisco, which creates large scale gestural technology experiences frequently deployed as entertainment and therapeutic stations in children's hospitals. It comprises 45 model X464UN 46-inch displays from NEC Display Solutions of America.

"The Discovery Zone is a marriage of gesture technology, animation and creative story-telling, the biggest install of its kind in a hospital," Kinesis CEO Greg Richey said in an announcement of the project.

"We are delighted to be a part of such a worthwhile initiative, especially one that will bring joy to children during their hospital stays," NEC Vice President of Marketing Ashley Flaska said in the announcement. "This combination of video wall and gesture technology expands all our imaginations, and underscores the commitment that Nemours and Kinesis Studio have made to creating something spectacular."

Flaska said in an email that this project had a little something extra in store for the team at NEC.

"NEC Display enters every project with the goal of helping customers achieve their objectives. The duPont initiative meets that threshold for success and more because of its goal of making kids' hospital stays a little less frightening," she wrote. "Kids will explore new worlds and expand their imaginations in the Discovery Zone, and we commend the hospital for setting the bar high for nurturing the kids in its care."

Feedback from Nemours educators, nurses, doctors, therapists, children and child life specialists helped bring the digital canvas to life with a fantasy world of imaginative content. One of the key constituencies, Izenberg said, was the hospital's children's occupational and physical therapists. Some of their young patients might need physical rehabilitation involving bending and stretching exercises, so they worked with the content developers "so that these kinds of motions could be built into the wall as part of the play," he said.

"In other words, what is sort of the stretching and onerous work of rehabilitation instead becomes enthralling play," he said.

But there were some serious technical challenges in a deployment such as this one that integrates gesture and interactivity for potentially up to 30 children, said Dogan Demir, the head of research and development at Kinesis Studio, in an email.

"One, developing software that will stay up and running 24/7 requires lengthy testing periods, and significant attention to decision regarding the selection of hardware to deploy," he wrote. "We need monitors that can last for a long time and we need to ensure that overheating is never an issue. On the software side, Microsoft Kinect is originally written for up to two players. Extending Kinect’s capacity and creating interactions that can work with almost as many people as you can fit in front of a camera requires a high degree of out-of-box thinking and proprietary code-writing."

But, given the constraints of the setting and the audience, gesture was a critical part of the project, Izenberg said. Not only do doctors and administrators not want bunches of children touching the same surface and banging on screens for both wear-and-tear and hygiene reasons, but touch also would limit how many children could interact with the screens at one time. And not only that, but touch and gesture create two very different experiences.

"We wanted this play to be immersive," Izenberg said. "We want children to be lost in the fun, so they're not just watching something, they're part of it … The interactivity that Kinect provides is really important to the experience."

And interactive digital signage capabilities and high-quality, high-resolution displays and responsive software programming offer up a wide range of possibilities for hospitals going forward, he said, in no small part because their technological capabilities are so high they essentially disappear.

"There's nothing that speaks to children quite like creative imagery that they're part of," he said. "But at the same time kids and parents are incredibly sophisticated in what they're looking at so you want sharp high-resolution images that are flawless, because people notice those things. We want, in a sense, the technology to fade into the background. It's an enabler of the imagination."

Images courtesy of Kinesis Studio.

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