At UK hospital, LED-illuminated wall helps calm children on the way to surgery

London's Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children has installed an LED-illuminated wall that soothes and engages kids on the way to the operating theater.

Managing patients’ fear is a significant challenge for professionals in virtually every medical field, but the difficulty is compounded considerably when the patients in question are children. We’ve already seen a dentist drill that plays relaxing music for such young patients, and recently we came across a like-minded effort on a larger scale at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children: an LED-illuminated wall that soothes and engages kids on the way to the operating theater. Created by Jason Bruges Studio, the Nature Trail covers a 50-meter stretch of corridor within the hospital’s new Morgan Stanley Clinical Building that culminates in the child’s arrival at the anesthesia room. Comprising a mix of integrated LED panels and custom graphic wallpaper, the installation is designed to create a calming yet engaging route to surgery. Seventy LED panels, including a total of 72,000 LEDs, are embedded into the wall surface at various heights in order to be accessible to the eye levels and positions of patients aged up to 16. Across those digital surfaces, interactive animated patterns of light reveal the presence of animals including horses, deer, hedgehogs, birds and frogs through the trees and foliage of the digital forest. The animals come to “life” when sensors in the ceiling detect movement below, causing them to engage and interact playfully with passers-by. The bespoke printed wallpaper, meanwhile, was created by Muraspec and is hospital-grade, bacteria-resistant and easily wiped clean. The video below explains the effort in more detail: The Nature Trail has already proven such a success that it is being expanded throughout the hospital by 2017, according to a Guardian report. Healthcare entrepreneurs the world over: One for inspiration! Spotted by: Murray Orange