Client:
Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital, Karolinska University Hospital
Dimh's services:
workshops, concept development, game design, UX/UI, graphics,
game development, target group testing, serious games
Together with Henrik Hjelmgren, Karolinska University Hospital, and Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital, we have developed two digital tools consisting of a mobile app and an AR game for the primary target group of children aged 5-15. The innovation "Stick Adventure" addresses the social phenomenon of needle phobia in children, where the mobile app is designed to help children prepare for a needle stick and to process the procedure after it has been performed. The AR game is designed to help the child during a needle-related procedure by distracting them from the pain experience.
The child wears AR glasses, one of the advantages of which is that the child has control over what is happening in the treatment room during the needle stick while playing the game. The game involves caring for trees that appear in the room. The child gets to water the trees, watch them grow, and see a squirrel (which is also in the mobile app) move in and jump around among the treetops.
The child can also initiate their own water fights with staff and accompanying adults, where no one needs to get really wet. Stickäventyret can be downloaded for free from the App Store and Google Play Store starting in January 2023. Augmented Reality is physically available at Astrid Lindgren's Children's Hospital. Stickäventyret was developed with financial support from Vinnova.
The collaboration began with a workshop in Stockholm to capture the purpose and expectations of the games. To gain an understanding of what children in hospital experience in terms of needle sticks, Dimh first accompanied a study visit to Astrid Lindgren's Children's Hospital. This was followed by a joint analysis of the target group to identify the children's needs and how these needs could be met.
When we at Dimh began working on the concept, we focused on the target group's needs that had emerged during the workshop. As there was more than one need to be met, we divided the solution into a mobile app
focusing on learning and rehabilitation, and an AR app focusing on distraction during needle sticks.
The result of the concept development was a living design document that described how the mobile and AR games could look and function, but with room for adjustments during development. The customer could then show the images and accompanying descriptive text to the target group to gather feedback.
To ensure that the mobile and AR game met the needs and expectations of the target audience, target group tests were conducted both in the middle and at the end of the development phase. Adjustments were then made based on the target group's feedback.
For Dimh, target group testing is a very important part of the process. It ensures that we are heading in the right/wrong direction, while also providing a basis for our reasoning when making decisions.
The development of Stick Adventure has been an iterative process, with parts of the mobile and AR games being shown to the customer during development. A major advantage of this is that the customer is involved throughout the process, has been able to share images or material with the target group to gather feedback, and we at Dimh have been able to capture feedback early on when there was still time to make adjustments or change direction.
With a dedicated and meticulous development team, which was involved from the start and throughout the process, Stickäventyret was launched in October 2022.
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