When 10-year-old Charlie Cagann went to Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago to have his adenoid removed, he was nervous about the surgery. But when he arrived at the hospital, there was something to help take his mind off things: an iPad.
Charlie — who already owns an iPod touch — picked up the Apple tablet and started playing one of his favorite games, Subway Surfers. Soon, he was completely at ease.
“It was fun to use it,” he remembers. “It makes you focus on the iPad, and it takes your mind off the surgery.”
The iPad already has won the hearts of doctors across the country, and now, they’ve started experimenting with the popular tablet computer as an anxiety reducer for children. Doctors at the University of Chicago use an app that recreates the in-utero sound of the human heart to distract newborns as they’re undergoing spinal taps. Doctors use another app, called Free Candle, in which the point is to blow out a candle, to get sick kids to really blow hard when checking their lungs. Over at Lurie, where Charlie had surgery two weeks ago, kids can chose everything from Fruit Ninja to Angry Birds to ease anxiety.
For most kids, the iPad is addictively fun. Parents fret about this at home, but in the hospital, that mind-sucking quality becomes an asset.
“Anxiety is a major source of dissatisfaction for children having surgery,” says Dr. Sam Seiden, a pediatric anesthesiologist at Lurie. “What we’re calling tablet-based interactive distraction using iPads here is proving to us to be as meaningful a distraction technique as using medications.”
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| Anesthesiologist Dr. Sam Seiden. Photo: Greg Ruffing/Wired |
Does that make the iPad a drug? Well, maybe.
At the University of Chicago, there’s an ongoing study looking at whether the iPad is better at distracting kids than more conventional techniques, such as television. Dr. Alisa McQueen, a pediatrician at the university, believes the tablet often works better. I think that the iPad has got some magic to it.”
That magic can make an emergency room procedure a lot more tolerable, if the patient can be distracted by the iPad. “Even though they’re totally, numb, traditionally kids are so freaked out by the fact that you stuck a needle in their face that they’re gone. They’re screaming and hollering for the rest of the whole experience,” McQueen says.
Over at Lurie, Seiden running a study that compares the iPad to Midazolam, and whether kids who use the iPad instead of medication tend to go home sooner after surgery. Both he and the the University of Chicago team hope to share their data within a year.
In a 2006 study, doctors at New Jersey Medical School found the Nintendo Game Boy was better than Midazolam at calming kids in the hospital, so it seems likely that iPad will post similar, if not better, results.
“You don’t have to be a gamer to have fun playing Fruit Ninja,” Seiden says. “Toddlers who have never seen it before can be engrossed by it on their first play.”
The doctors are looking for conclusive, scientific proof, but parents will offer plenty of anecdotal evidence. When Christy Shebuski brought her two-and-a-half-year-old, Grace, to Lurie to have her tonsils removed, the girl was scared of the hospital and doctors in gowns. The iPad eased her fears.
“Dr. Seiden came in with this fancy iPad with this cool rubber case and her eyes were immediately drawn to it,” Shebuski says. “I said, ‘Yeah, let’s go for it. Let’s give her this instead of giving her sedatives.’ We didn’t have to drug my kid before giving her surgery.”
Since the iPad can play videos and download new apps, it gives doctors even more options than a Game Boy, McQueen says. A few weeks ago, she says, a 6-year-old Belieber come in for a procedure. Rather than give the girl a sedative, doctors gave her an iPad. The girl was soon singing along to Justin Bieber videos, completely at ease.
“There’s something about the way they engage with it where they’re using their hands,” says McQueen.
On the downside, the University of Chicago’s had some iPads stolen. Another downside is that kids might go home with negative associations attached to the games and apps they used. Charlie Cagann isn’t quite the fan of Subway Surfers he once was. He says it reminds him of the hospital and — for the time being — he’d just as soon forget about his surgery.
His dad, Robb Cagann, says that he was amazed by the iPad’s distracting power. He knows a thing or two about kids and medicine. He’s a paramedic with the Elgin Fire Department, just northwest of Chicago. He drives around with a teddy bear in his ambulance to distract kids whenever he has to perform a medical feature in the field.
The teddy bear helps, he says, but he’d love to have an iPad.
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