Funding outcome

Hospitals and clinics can be a stressful place for children and their parents. Unfortuately, many medical procedures aimed at helping or diagnosing children can cause them pain and distress. These include needle pokes, setting a broken bone, or dressing changes. Also, children frequently come to the hospital or clinic with painful complaints or illnesses. These painful experiences can have long lasting negative effects. Two common methods for managing a child's pain in the healthcare setting are medications and distraction. Medications are not always practical and may come with unwanted side effects. Distraction lowers the child's pain and distress by moving their attention from the painful thing (e.g. a needle poke), to a more pleasant sensation (e.g. familiar children's songs). There are many forms of distraction such as music, stories, pictures, and focused breathing. Our group has already done research showing that music can reduce the pain and distress associated with medical procedures in children. Another form of distraction is engaging in technology, such as virtual reality, human-like robots, smart phones, video games, personal computers, or tablet computers. The latest research is showing tremendous potential for these distractors. For example, data from one small study showed that reported pain is dramatically lowered when children with burn injuries play virtual reality games during dressing changes. Our proposed project will involve a review of all the research examining the use of digital technology to manage children's pain and distress in the healthcare setting, for both disease-related pain and procedure-related pain. Should sufficient data exist, we will also conduct more indepth analysis to figure out if certain distraction techniques work best for particular procedures/conditions (e.g. video games for needle pokes). The results from this study will help us figure out what areas need more immediate research, and could lead to immediate and important improvements in how health professionals and parents manage children's pain, if there is already enough proof for a specific technology, in the medical literature.