Customer Experience

Special Olympics, edgefactory craft inclusive fun with digital signage

Provided by edgefactory.

November 7, 2022

The U.S. Special Olympics have partnered with edgefactory to help create an accessible experience at its 2022 Orlando games, including digital signage, for athletes going through mandatory health screenings before competition events, according to a press release and case study.

The Special Olympics Healthy Athlete Experience includes health screening and education for more than 12,000 athletes during check-in for the events of the week-long Games, utilizing the services of 600 doctors and prioritizing inclusiveness and fun for a variety of special needs athletes. In partnership with Qmatic, edgefactory leveraged digital signage to help organize athletes and caregivers with branded, entertaining content along with wayfinding; content was organized into a virtual "TV channel" for streamlining.

Creative included large-font captioning, content-targeting for different areas and venues and music. Digital signage provided multimedia cues for athletes when it was their turn for an exam, pairing an athlete's number with symbols and colors for a given exam type. Digital signage was also integrated with physical signage and visual cues to assist wayfinding.

"What a great honor it was for us to produce world class content for these amazing athletes," Brian Cole, CEO at edgefactory, said in the press release. "We did everything we could through visualization (to) not only help over 12,000 athletes get medical exams, but also adding energy, emotion and edge to the sporting venues with not only dynamic content, but an accessible TV channel on the games playing at all the venues with interviews of the athletes each day featured."

Fred Bernstein, VP of partnerships and development at the Special Olympics USA Games, told Digital Signage Today: "edgefactory's involvement in the production of best-in-class creative content, as well as providing high-quality digital screens to display that content, was integral to the 2022 Special Olympics USA Games Local Organizing Committees' vision of delivering a memorable athlete/guest experience within this year's Healthy Athletes Experience. edgefactory's team collaborated flawlessly with the team at Qmatic, our virtual queue management sponsor, to deliver the tools that allowed us to provide over 13,000 free health screenings across seven disciplines to over 3,900 athletes within a period of seven days. Unprecedented!"