Pittsburgh children's hospital using game kiosks to ease youngsters' visits

The Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh is using interactive game-play kiosks to help make children's hospital visits as enjoyable as possible, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

The KICK — Kid's Interactive Creation Kiosk — is the brainchild of a collaborative effort ot Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center and Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh and was created by Electric Owl Studios, an East Liberty-based video-game company.

Carnegie Mellon students came up with the idea for the touchscreen videogame system loaded with fun, easy-to-learn games as a way to make a trip to the hospital less tedious and miserable for children.

Since the first prototype was installed in 2006, the kiosks have spread to 35 hospital waiting rooms in 23 states, and the kiosks at Children's of Pittsburgh have logged more than 83 million touches combined and more than four years of active play time and more than 20 years of combined uptime.