Home » How children hospitals are using Pokémon Go to help kids recover

How children hospitals are using Pokémon Go to help kids recover

pokemon go

I bet you have heard about Pokémon Go! Of course, you have! It has taken over the world. Sure, some flaky incidents have taken place ever since people started playing but doesn’t mean the game is ‘evil’ or there’s no use of playing it at all.  

Two hospitals in the United States are using this  to persuade their patients to get out of bed and cheer up their moods.

The app, Pokémon Go, is an increased reality diversion/augmented reality game that players play on their smartphones. They can move around the environment to catch, train, and fight virtual Pokémon characters that they find on their phones.The University of Washington Burn Center has been testing the application since last Saturday, helping the patients keep their bodies in movement. The amusement helps the patients move their injured zones, which keep them from getting infected. It also takes their mind off of the discomfort.

Shelley Wiechman, the psychologist at the Burn and Pediatric Trauma Service and Pediatric Primary Care Clinic at Harborview, had this to say in regards to the amusing app:

“Our challenge is to find something that’s more stimulating and engaging than pain they’re experiencing, so something like virtual reality that’s new or “Pokémon Go” that’s new, it’s more exciting and takes attention away from the pain.”

Harborview isn’t the one and only using the diversion. The University of Michigan Children’s Hospital has also gotten in on the act. They say it’s an incredible approach to get kids out of their beds and socialize with each other. They have even discovered that it is an incredible help for a few kids who have been hesitant to take part in physical treatment or those hesitant to get their exercises in.

J.J. Bouchard, The hospital’s digital director said:

“All of our nurses and doctors love it because they all grew up with it, and our patients were excited about it. Right away, I knew this was going to be a powerful tool to use to encourage patients to get out of bed.”

While a few hospitals have banned the app since they feel it has been stopping up the lobbies, these two are grasping it and appreciating the virtual ride.

Want another great example of how Pokémon Go is being for a better cause? Pokemon Go might be able to help kids with autism spectrum disorder.

From time to time, kids with ASD can be somewhat unbending in their behaviors and disinclined to new experiences. They are a little more receptive to sensory overload as compare to people who do not have ASD. Subsequently, they can occasionally be somewhat less daring and open to beginning conversations and discussions with other children. However, as indicated by stories from Today, Parent Herald, and different outlets, Pokémon Go is by all accounts successfully reassuring a few children with ASD to investigate the world a bit — and, more importntly, to participate in conversation with other Pokémon fans.

A few grateful parents of have explained how their children are becoming more social and going outside more.

There are a fair amount of theoretical reasons why the amusement could help kids on the spectrum. Numerous kids with autism grow niche obsessions with specific subjects. Regularly, those subjects veer a bit toward the nerdy, around the quantitative and specialized. So one of the issues autistic children sometimes have with making companions is other children who aren’t on the range, or who share those interests. Following a couple of minutes of a second-grader with ASD enthusiastically jabbering about how microprocessors work, different children may begin to lose interest or block him out. Many autism specialists explain that kids with spectrum  tend to be interested in video games, mainly because they allow them to separate themselves from the social world. An amusing game like Pokémon Go, with its stress on the tedious task of collecting Pokémon, looking at statistics, and so on, is presumably more probable than other video games for them. What’s more, kids not on the range are also getting sucked into the vortex. So when children with extreme introvertedness go out looking for Pokémon and keep running into different children doing the same, they have a simple subject for conversation.

Free-form conversations tend to be a little tricky and intimidating for kids with ASD but when it comes to Pokémon Go, they can have pretty straightforward conversations with other people, for example: What level is your trainer? Or Which Pokémon did you find? Pokémon Go individuals are encouraged to talk with others to find what’s out there and how they can gather more. It would be nice to know whether this conversations with other individuals turn into friendship or not but for the moment, it is charming to think about the kids who may have struggled in the past to make friends are now able to bond with others with the help of Pokémon Go!

Related Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *