Patient Emotion Therapy - P.E.T.

The Brief

Jordan Idehen and Josh Feldman

The Brief

Nina Cragg

Hospitals, while being great for health, are often places in which people experience a lot of emotional stress, boredom, and discomfort. This is often due to the long waiting periods that both patients and the caregiver go through when waiting to meet with a doctor. It is often the case that a patient and caregiver may be waiting two hours for a five minute talk with the doctor. The Captivator is a device that address the issue of ambiguous hospital waits by giving the caregiver and the patient a device that gives a time estimate of when the doctor will attend to them. The device does this by changes color depending on where in the waiting and meeting process they are in, in relation to the doctors rounds. 

The goal of the Captivator was to make something that both distracted the patient from the situation they are in by being both tactile and visually pleasing. At the same time, it is also a useful tool because it relieves some of the ambiguity of the wait time. We went through a bunch of iterations of the shape of our design and decided on a dodecahedron because it is both ergonomic to the joints of the hand and is also an intruiging shape to look at. The Captivator uses a bluetooth shield connected to an arduino to recieve signals determining when to light up the LEDs in the caregiver/patients device.