Weather variations in the UAE exacerbate chronic lung conditions, resulting in a high incidence of hospital admissions for kids needing emergency nebulization treatment. This can be quite a traumatic experience for families as the child is struggling to sit still in one place to inhale the full dosage. And resulting in an unsuccessful treatment for the asthmatic child patient.

Create patient education and engagement that would ensure successful emergency hospital visits of child asthma patients who currently were unable to inhale the full dosage.

To turn six minutes of a traumatic nebulization treatment into an engaging and effective experience, we created Neb Adventures an interactive immersive project mapping experience that featured the adventures of Hamood and Dana.

The characters in the stories suffer from respiratory problems similar to the child, such as congestion, shortness of breath, and cough.

Once the child puts on the nebulization mask, the interactive experience brings our characters and storyline to life throughout the course of the treatment.

These characters and stories were created under the supervision of the pediatricians, providing much-needed comfort to the child facing discomfort during course of the treatment.

During the experience, if the mask position changed, the sensors altered the child’s adventure reminding them to put the mask on correctly.

We extended the storytelling experience into an app helping facilitate in home treatments, easing the experience for both the parents and their children.

Our primary audience was the families with children upto 8 years who would rush to nebulization treatments in hospitals.

Hospitals were our secondary audience in terms of adopting the concept of an interactive nebulization room within their premises as this would help them navigate cases of child patients completing the nebulization treatment.

Our approach was ensuring the child is able to intake the full dosage of the nebulization treatment by being engaged with the interactive projected story to sit still throughout the duration of the treatment.

“The NEB Adventures of Hamood and Dana” an immersive interactive project mapping experience, was set up in nebulization room at the Al Qassimi Women and Children Hospital in April 2019. We had 4 interactive stories that would come to life on the room walls for the child patients who visited the Emergency Room to be engaged with during the course of their nebulization treatment.

The stories featured regionally relevant characters Hamood and Dana who spoke in two key languages the child patients were familiar with ie. English and Arabic.

The mobile app enabled parents to effectively administer Nebulization treatments and keep their child engaged even at home. Parents had to use the patient ID created at the hospital to access the app, allowing the doctors to track on the treatment and improvement of the child patients journey and collecting data for the hospital’s records.

The Neb Rooms experience is now being implemented and developed across 5 more children hospitals in the UAE that are in association with the Ministry of Health.

We were able to achieve an 87.5% completion rate of children who were able to inhale a full dosage in the Neb Adventures room. And not once was their mask removed during the treatment.

Building on the national success, Astra Zeneca has planned to extend the implementation of Neb Adventures globally to China’s Global innovation center.

Neb Adventures helped create a holistic ecosystem that enabled the doctors to track adherence and progress of child asthma patients from the hospital to comforts of child’s home.

And it earned positive advocacy from health as well as media publications and websites:

“Turning 6 minutes of treatment into 6 minutes of entertainment.” (Health Marketing Quarterly)

“An innovative health idea that has scale.” (Techcrunch)