9/19/2014 Digital signage and wonder: 50-foot video wall brings adventure to children's hospital | Digital Signage Today

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Digital signage and wonder: 50-footvideo wall brings adventure tochildren's hospital

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 AlfredI. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Delaware, it paid special attention to the experience of its youngpatients.

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And when chemicals titan DuPont — more fully, the E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. — came to NemoursChildren's Health with a generous donation and a very specific challenge, the stage was set to bring a very specialinteractive 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, thedonation and challenge was to "create something spectacular in this soaring new atrium that would bring joy to kidsand 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-highvideo wall featuring Microsoft Kinect gesture interaction technology that will allow up to 30 children (and adults) tointeract 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 beinghere," Izenberg said in a recent interview. "And we just hope we can tear them away so they can go to theirdoctor's appointments."

The Discovery Zone was designed by Kinesis Studio of San Francisco, which creates large scale gesturaltechnology 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 itskind 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 theirhospital stays," NEC Vice President of Marketing Ashley Flaska said in the announcement. "This combination of videowall and gesture technology expands all our imaginations, and underscores the commitment that Nemours andKinesis Studios 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 initiativemeets 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 thehospital for setting the bar high for nurturing the kids in its care."

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Feedback from Nemours educators, nurses, doctors, therapists, children and child life specialists helped bringthe digital canvas to life with a fantasy world of imaginative content. One of the key constituencies, Izenbergsaid, was the hospital's children's occupational and physical therapists. Some of their young patients mightneed physical rehabilitation involving bending and stretching exercises, so they worked with the contentdevelopers "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 enthrallingplay," he said.

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

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

But, given the constraints of the setting and the audience, gesture was a critical part of the project, Izenberg said. Notonly do doctors and administrators not want bunches of children touching the same surface and banging on screensfor both wear-and-tear and hygiene reasons, but touch also would limit how many children could interact with thescreens 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 justwatching 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 softwareprogramming offer up a wide range of possibilities for hospitals going forward, he said, in no small part because theirtechnological 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 thesame 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 technologyto fade into the background. It's an enabler of the imagination."

Images courtesy of Kinesis Studios.

Topics: Display Technology , Healthcare / Hospitals , Installation / Integration , Interactive /Touchscreen

Companies: NEC Display Solutions

Christopher Hall / Christopher is the editor of DigitalSignageToday.com. A longtime freelancewriter and reporter, he's bringing a fresh perspective and critical take on the industry. www