A study conducted by UC Davis (Sacremento) has looked at video-conferencing with family, friends for pediatric patients:
To ease isolation during extended hospitalizations, UC Davis Children's Hospital offers secure video-conferencing for patients and families. While anecdotal accounts have suggested the Family-Link program enhances quality of life during long hospital stays, clinicians wondered if the technology also offered clinical benefits. To answer that, a team led by UC Davis professor James Marcin studied 367 children who were hospitalized for at least four days. They found that access to Family-Link significantly reduced patient stress. The study was published in the journal Pediatrics.
As the popularity of applications like Skype and FaceTime have increased, so has the number of patients interested in using these applications to communicate with family and friends. UC Davis Children's Hospital pioneered the Family-Link program, which provides patients with laptops, web-cams and secure internet connections. Overall, children who used Family-Link experienced a greater reduction in stress than children who did not use Family-Link. Oddly, this effect was even more pronounced for children who lived closer to the hospital and had shorter hospitalizations. This group experienced a 37 percent stress reduction when using Family-Link.
In addition to the stress survey, families were also asked about the quality of the video, audio and overall Family-Link experience. The responses were uniformly positive with the majority of parents rating the program excellent or good.
"This study shows that we have another tool to help children during their hospital stays", said Yang. "The improvement in stress scores shows that Family-Link is really helping many children and might possibly be improving outcomes."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 05 2014, @06:10AM
Kids in hospital get lonely and stressed. No surprise there.
Doesn't every hospital have Wifi now? They should. The only reasons that ever existed for isolating patients from the general population, were concerns over communicability of diseases. You don't want a patient contracting diseases, you don't want the patient giving diseases to their siblings.
Telecommunications are sterile. Give the kid all the communications he could possibly want. Reduce the stress, and get the patient out the door even quicker.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 05 2014, @08:44AM
https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/free-software-replacement-for-skype [fsf.org]
(Score: 1) by Preston on Saturday July 05 2014, @04:59PM
This article is just a perpetuation of a dangerous and scary trend where people simply look at a tool and judge it by it's utility and application without a thought of how things became possible and the license tied to the technology. I remember our local Linux User Group had a paid full time member that would go to businesses door to door and explain to them the dangers of proprietary software and demonstrate the benefits of open source. His efforts may have not resulted in much action, and the idea of telling these businesses that the local lug would convert them to open source for free had some businesses scratching their heads, but the efforts were not in vein.
If only more people would speak out against these proprietary services and devices, be them used in a hospital, or a home, the population might become more aware of the world they live in. Saying that Skype and FaceTime have been used to help children, rather than saying, "video conference services" only proves the point that we are being further conditioned to accept the commercialization of technology and thus our lives.