Healthcare Technology Featured Article

December 27, 2011

New Avatars and Toylike Medical Gadgets Helping Traumatized Children Heal


Imagine, on your 18th birthday, that you are almost consumed in the flames of a car crash, lose both feet, most of your hands and are in the hospital in unbearable pain for six months. This happened to a girl named Caitlin, according to the Phoenix Society for Burn Survivors.

How would you go on? Well, one day, children who are just as badly burned as Caitlin might be able to douse their pain by feeling they were cocooned in a block of ice. Or in a polar environment, where they could feel they were “crossing the threshold of reality, to dull (their) pain," according to Patrick Dube, who is leading a team of medics in Canada to do just that with avatars using “toy-like medical gadgets.”

According to a study done in North Carolina of children nine to 16, one-quarter had experienced at least one traumatic event in their lives, and by age 16, almost 70 percent had. While not all these events were medical in nature, children who have been traumatized in any way have had something happen to them that is “outside the range of usual human experience,” according to the Child Trauma Academy. The web site goes on to say that “trauma often involves a sense of intense fear, terror, and helplessness.”

Dube is working with medical professionals from Montreal's Sainte-Justine hospital and software engineers at the Society for Arts and Technology to help traumatized children learn to re-enter society through the use of sensory stimulation and “cognitive illusions,” or virtual worlds, like three-dimensional images of a child's bedroom at home to make him forget he is in a hospital, according to a story by Michael Viatteau at news.yahoo.com.

"We know that cognitive illusions have an effect on the perception of pain," Dube told Viatteau.

And where is it all happening? At the Satosphere, a 60-foot-wide dome originally set up as a space with a 360-degree view of art projections. Here, the team now has set up a hospital room, or "living lab," to work out new treatment ideas, according to Viatteau.

"We can, through multiple projectors, create immersive environments that integrate not only walls, but also the furniture in a room," Dube told Viatteau.

Another tool being tested by the doctors? Medical gadgets made to look like other-worldly, non-threatening toys to help children not be afraid of them in a medical setting, Viatteau writes.

And even healthy children are benefiting. A syringe is transformed into a storybook rocket and a little girl loses her fear, according to Viatteau. "I'm no longer scared of injections," Maxime, 11, the daughter of one of the researchers, told Viatteau.

The ultimate aim, Viatteau writes, is to use the technology to help the children "overcome their fears and discover things about themselves," as Patricia Garel, head of Sainte-Justine's psychiatry department, told him. "There's enormous potential in our discipline, but we're still at a very early exploratory stage."

However, there could be a down side. Virtual communication and video games sometimes have a deleterious effect on the socialization of children, particularly those who have been traumatized and are “emotionally fragile, who might shut themselves in,” writes Viatteau.

But Garel says that the tools, if used properly, could help traumatized children eventually return to the world the rest of us live in, Viatteau notes.


Deborah DiSesa Hirsch is an award-winning health and technology writer who has worked for newspapers, magazines and IBM in her 20-year career. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Rich Steeves
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