Health Hack 2016
Zhao and I have no design or development experience, so we had to make do with what resources we could gather online. We managed to produce a working prototype by piecing together license free videos and sound bites from NASA and turning the video into a stereoscopic format with InstaVR. InstaVR then exported the files in an app format to ANDROID/IOS.
Resources NASA http://nasasearch.nasa.gov/search?query=360&affiliate=nasa&utf8=%E2%9C%93 http://www.nasa.gov/connect/sounds/index.html http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/
InstaVR www.instavr.co/
Research
Personal experience from Zhao and George (work for NSW Health) almost every day they face a child who is distressed when undergoing anaesthetic.
Just looking around online - the estimates have high variance Roughly 5% of children in Australia are anaesthetised each year, there's approx 4.8 million kids in Aus (< 18 y.o.) - which gives approx 240,000 episodes of anaesthesia per year
- majority are GAs.
Most tertiary paediatric hospital anaesthetic departments 15-20,000 episodes of care per year, again majority would be GAs.
Most common type of paediatric surgery requiring anaesthetic care =
- adenoids and tonsils
- various gen surg (hernias, appendices, etc)
- ORIFs, lumps, bumps At the Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne, the above 3 categories account for almost 50% of all surgeries performe.
Pre-op anxiety is associated with many bad outcomes
Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 1996 Dec;150(12):1238-45. They found majority of children exhibit pre-op anxiety. Adverse effects are continued at follow up.
"Overall, 54% of children exhibited some negative behavioral responses at the 2-week follow-up Twenty percent of the children continued to demonstrate negative behavior changes at 6-month follow-up, and, in 7.3% of the children, these behaviors persisted at 1-year follow-up. Nightmares, separation anxiety, eating problems, and increased fear of physicians were the most common problems at 2-week follow-up. "
Another review article quoted verbatim:
A majority of children experience significant stress and anxiety before surgery.[1] Studies have demonstrated an association between preoperative anxiety and adverse postoperative clinical outcomes, such as emergence delirium, increased analgesic requirements, and negative behavioural changes (e.g. bed-wetting, altered appetite, sleep disturbance, and separation anxiety).[1 – 3] Alarmingly some of these behavioural changes can persist for months into the postoperative period. Therefore, in order to improve the perioperative course of these children, it is essential that measures are taken to relieve their anxiety.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Kain+ZN%2C+Mayes+LC%2C+O%27Connor+TZ%2C+Cicchetti+DV
Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 1996 Dec;150(12):1238-45. Preoperative anxiety in children. Predictors and outcomes. Kain ZN1, Mayes LC, O'Connor TZ, Cicchetti DV.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23076227
In the United States, approximately 450,000 children under 18 years of age are admitted for surgery as inpatients annually. One quarter of these children are under 3 years of age and the majority for gastrointestinal, orthopedic, or urological surgery.