The toys are embedded with RFID tags that activate a TV animation related to that particular animal.


“We provide information to the children so they’re less scared when they go into the room,” says Werner Satter, general manager of healthcare experience solutions for Philips.

The products are also aimed at reducing repeat scans, wait times and rescheduling related to anxiety-producing exams.

CT fantasy
Companies have also developed ways to transform imaging centers so that they resemble amusement parks more than medical facilities.

GE’s Adventure Series turns X-ray and CT rooms, nuclear medicine systems and MRI scanners into what look like rides that wouldn’t seem out of place at Disneyland.

Before the scan, children receive a coloring book with an adventure story and the technologists talk about what they’re going to do during the exam in a way they can understand, telling them that they’re going to keep still by pretending to be a statue or rag doll.

The Nuclear Medicine Jungle Adventure, for example, has a table that looks like a canoe and the scanner is decorated with fish. The technologist tells the young patient that if they hold still, the fish will jump around them, which happens as the scanner rotates.


“They believe they’re making the fish jump out of the pond,” says Douglas Dietz, a GE industrial designer who helped develop the Adventure Series.

For hospitals in San Francisco, GE developed an MRI scanner to look like a cable car and created an exam room designed to look like the Muir Woods National Monument. Some technologists even wear eye patches in pirate ship-themed rooms.

Dietz says the products emerged from the idea that children have the ability to escape into a fantasy world by turning “three kitchen chairs and a blanket into a fort.”

“We can shift them so they’re a protagonist in a story,” Dietz says. “One girl was even begging her mom to go back tomorrow.”

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