Israeli AI Innovation Empowers Hospitalized Children to Communicate

A new initiative at Israeli hospital, Clalit-Schneider Children’s Medical Center, in Petah Tikva, is helping ensure that every child has a way to express themselves, regardless of their ability to speak when they are hospitalized.

Hospitalized children who are too young to talk or who have special needs may struggle to communicate their thoughts, feelings, and requests to medical staff, reports The Jerusalem Post. Even children who normally speak will lose the ability to do so if they are on a ventilator. 

School-age patients may be unable to or too weak to write what they need. So how do you communicate with a pediatric patient who is non-verbal?

The hospital’s solution was to  design a system that leverages AI to create individualized communication boards, allowing hospitalized non-verbal children to express their thoughts, feelings, and needs. But what are communication boards and how do they work?

Communication Boards
Communication boards are devices that display symbols, pictures and other illustrations to help people who have limited language skills to express their needs, according to Healthline. Nonverbal people can point or blink at the images they want to communicate. This works well in a hospital settings for children.

Communication boards that contain pictures for children to point to, can give children their voices back. The boards allow a child to communicate their needs. 

However, creating custom communication boards can be a time-consuming task. There is now an easier way, reports i24NEWS.

A new AI-powered system, designed in partnership between Clalit-Schneider Children’s Medical Center and Code for Israel, dramatically reduces the time needed to create a custom communication board from hours to only five minutes.

The system allows providers to generate personalized boards that take into account children’s needs, ages, languages, and backgrounds.The boards are then shared with the child’s care team and stored so they can be updated and reused as needed.

Empowering Patients and Provider
This new system can help hospitalized children and their families to maintain more control and autonomy and this reduces fear and frustration.

The system is not just for nonverbal kids, it’s for any child who is frightened or overwhelmed about being in the hospital. For them the new technology can make their stays easier. And the new system allows the communication boards to be created within minutes so that two-way communication can occur faster and more children can be helped.

“When a child cannot speak, they don’t just lose their voice — they may also lose the ability to say that they are in pain, that they are afraid, or that they simply want their parents, Dr. Oshrat Sella Weiss, head of the Speech-Language Pathology Service at Schneider Children’s Medical Center tells JPost.

 “For us, technology is not the story. The story is about restoring children’s ability to communicate, express themselves and participate actively in their care,” she added.

With this innovative program, children who might otherwise struggle to communicate can once again share what they are thinking and feeling. By combining innovative technology with compassionate care, Schneider Children’s Medical Center is helping make hospital stays a little less frightening and a lot more empowering for young patients and their families.