In thinking about how we will build our interactive storytelling platform for the waiting room, one problem that keeps coming up is germs! They are everywhere in a hospital. Could this be a solution?

This slide show from Daniel Sands at the Harvard Medical School outlines some of the new ways of engaging patients on their terms.

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Today we finally turn our focus back to working on our interactive storytelling platform to be built for the patients and staff at Alameda County Medical Center’s Highland General Hospital. This side of the project has been on hiatus while we’ve been hard at work on our feature film The Waiting Room, which follows a day-in-the-life of several patients and caregivers at Highland. We’re in the final weeks of editing and hope to have a finished film sometime in October. We are hearing from quite a few people who’ve been following the project that they thought the storytelling booth had already been built! No. The videos you see on our site were shot by project director Pete Nicks. They were then carefully edited and posted to the site. The next phase of the project will be collecting user generated media by the patients themselves, tagging it, organizing it and making it useful for a variety of niche audiences including the hospital administration itself. The project is sure to present interesting challenges, fascinating discoveries and of course some amazing stories. So stay tuned as we begin the next exciting phase of the project. And as always, we’ll see you in The Waiting Room.

Data visualizations can tell a powerful story during in a very brief interaction. Because people are consuming and sharing media in new ways – and there are now so many options – these visualizations need to make an impact and encourage sharing across social networks. Media organizations can use these tools to augment more traditional media to engage with their readers/viewers/listeners in deeper ways. These tools can be particularly interesting when served to populations that typically would not come across this type of content. The challenge is offering this content in ways that have meaning for specific audiences. With our interactive media booth prototype (to be installed in the ER waiting room at ACMC’s Highland Hospital) we will be looking closely at how people use it, what stories the platform can capture and what type of content they would like to interact with.

Jackie Jones and Darlene Jones, two old friends who haven’t seen each other in years, meet in the waiting room and catch up on old times.

At the NFCB panel talking community engagement with new media technologies.