Waiting for learning: designing interactive education materials for patient waiting areas

We describe the research and design of educational media for children in doctor's office waiting areas. Even though technology use for medical purposes has become increasingly prominent for doctors, administration, and patients, research on the use of interactive technology for health education is limited. In this project, we focus on clinics for Sickle Cell Disease treatment. These clinics treat patients of various ages and disease severity, but all patients make frequent, recurring visits for treatments and checkups. We describe our current research to better understand the behaviors and activities of patients as they wait in the clinic, their expectations and understandings of Sickle Cell Disease and its treatment, the educational material currently available, and our preliminary methods for developing interactive technologies for these environments. This reseach includes observations in pediatric clinic waiting areas, interviews with clinic staff, and preliminary user testing with our interactive designs. This paper details our observations of waiting areas in two sickle cell clinics. We discuss our findings and their implications for design. We also describe the design of an augmented reality tablet application that we placed in the waiting area for user testing. We use this study to discuss further design iterations and directions for future work.