VR and Mixed-Realities Play Kit to Prepare Under 10s for an MRI

This project will produce an innovative digital play kit for preparing children aged 4-10 years to undertake a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan without the need for a General Anaesthetic. Current ways of preparing children (Play Specialists, mock or toy scanners etc) are expensive and costly to the National Health Service in terms of time and space requirements. Children's access to these forms of support is therefore extremely limited, particularly as the majority of MRIs are carried out in adult hospitals. General anaesthetics are both costly and risky to child health but in the absence of high quality, readily available low-cost resources to support children so that they can tolerate MRI, general anaesthetics are often used routinely in order to avoid failure of the procedure or low quality images.

The digital play kit aims to reduce the need for general anaesthetics in 4-10 year old children, thus saving the NHS in excess of £3 million per year. It will do this by providing an age-appropriate experience that utilises the most recent innovations in digital play. The Mixed Reality play kit will be able to be used in the home and in the hospital setting and will provide cutting edge augmented and virtual reality play opportunities which will take children, and their parent/s, through the entirety of the patient journey. The digital play kit will have four elements: Physical Play, Augmented Reality Play, Virtual Reality Play and Digital rewards. The product will therefore take advantage of the fact that play has been documented as an effective way to promote health and wellbeing by allowing children to make sense of their experiences, express fear, normalise unusual events and thus reduce anxieties.