Using an interactive design to improve patient experience inchildren's hospitals: A child-friendly interactive visualdesign proposal

The hospital environment generally causes aggressive behaviors and anxiety in pediatric patients. Negative conditions, such as being forced to be in a foreign environment with anxious, tired and stressed people outside of their safe areas, cause children to be afraid of hospitals and even cause traumas that may occur in the future. Hospitals are generally designed by focusing on functional features rather than user needs. For a good patient experience in all children's hospitals, it is necessary to focus on the needs of sick children. Necessary importance and priority should be given to the establishment of various spatial design practices and social support environments that will help children cope with the psychological and physical discomforts of their illnesses and treatments, and that will enable them to overcome this process with less stress and tension. Some public hospitals do not focus much on the use of child-oriented designs and applications in the areas of hospitals for children. Private children's hospitals, on the other hand, widely use child-oriented social support environments and enviromental graphics. In this thesis, it is aimed to produce solution proposals consisting of simple interactive designs that can appeal to children in order to provide a positive hospital experience for pediatric patients. In this study, the effect of the hospital environment on children was examined and information was given about this subject. Hospital environments from past to present; Child-friendly designs and development processes suitable for the user, that is, children, were investigated and the samples found were interpreted and compared. Understanding the needs of children, especially sick children, is an important point in terms of knowing the methods and techniques of the design to be made. For this reason, for the interactive visual design study, interactive design studies applied to children in hospital environments and the effects of these studies on pediatric patients were examined. In this direction, attention was paid to child-oriented design elements. In this study, first of all, interactive design, which is one of the main elements of the thesis, is discussed. In the second part, children and interactive design studies for children, which are the other main elements of the thesis, are mentioned. In the third chapter, firstly, children's hospitals and their effects on children, the interaction of pediatric patients with the environment are discussed. Detailed information is given on subjects such as their definitions, historical development processes, features, purposes, uses and effects. In this part, the relationship between the child hospital and the psychology of sick children, the relationship between the hospital environment and their experiences and needs are emphasized. After examining the effects of child-oriented designs and the use of interactive design on the hospital experience of children, various studies produced in this field are examined. Finally, children's hospitals and the use of interactive designs in the hospital environment are emphasized and an example interactive visual design proposal is presented according to the results.