An app that lets children take a sneak peek at a hospital received the most votes from the Klokhuis audience on Sunday 17 March. The ‘take a peek’ module was the IDE graduation project of Britt Müller at the Hospital Hero foundation.
Charlotte Poot, Britt Müller en Nicole Donkel receive the Klokhuis Science Price 2024. (Photo: Klokhuis)
It was a classic Hollywood moment at the International Science Film Festival in Nijmegen. On stage were the three most appealing projects from a shortlist of 10 nominated studies, three of which were from TU Delft. Then the golden envelope emerged containing the name of – drum roll – Britt Müller. “Suddenly there was confetti and cheering,” she recalls a few days later.
Müller’s prize is a Klokhuis (a children’s television show, in Dutch) episode about her research that will premiere at the film festival next year. “Yes, that is so cool,” says Müller, “Also for the Hospital Hero Foundation. They have been working for years to make children’s hospital experiences a little better.”
The Hospital Hero Foundation (in Dutch) is the initiative of eHealth researcher Charlotte Poot and paediatric nurse Nicole Donkel from the Willem-Alexander children’s hospital (WAKZ), part of the Leiden University Medical Centre LUMC. They founded Hospital Hero in 2022 with the aim of making hospital visits less stressful for children. They developed an app that gives relevant information to children in a way and at a level that appeals to them: playful, clear, and with lots of animals.
Anti anxiety
Britt Müller developed the Even Spieken (take a peek) module for the app as a graduation project at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE). After talking to care professionals, parents and children in hospital, she understood that unfamiliar surroundings and a childlike imagination were often sources of anxiety. “If you asked ‘who is behind that door?’ the answer could be ‘a man with a jackhammer’,” she recalls. So she figured out that you could reduce anxiety by letting children take a peek at the treatment room before their visit.
Müller designed the Even Spieken module for the cardiology department of the outpatient clinic. It covers heart screening, cardiac ultrasound and blood sampling. Currently, four hospitals are connected. But the Hospital Hero app with the Even Spieken module seems suitable for many more paediatric departments in many more hospitals. This is the foundation’s mission in the near future, and Müller is now working there as the project leader.
Before the award ceremony in the Nijmegen library, the 10 nominated researchers gave public presentations to children.
- Also check: The Klokhuis page on the science prize (in Dutch)
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