StoryFutures & Roald Dahl's Marvellous Children’s Charity: Rare Disease Day 2021
We're delighted to announce Play Well for Life as the winner of Roald Dahl's Marvellous Children's Charity Challenge today, Rare Disease Day 2021.
In collaboration with the Charity and its Nurse’s Advisory Group, Play Well for Life will work with leading researchers in creative storytelling and clinical psychology at StoryFutures to create an Augmented Reality card game that explores how immersive storytelling can improve the ‘transition of care’ of seriously ill young people when moving from child to adult health services.
'Play Well for Life's approach during our StoryLab open innovation process stood out for its ability to really speak to what seriously young people are experiencing – which is a more complex version of what all young people go through. Their ability to put great storytelling at the heart of a creative experience for these patients will be really exciting’ said Professor James Bennett, Director of StoryFutures.
'It's great to have Play Well for Life and StoryFutures on this journey with us to explore innovative new ways that we can help seriously ill young people as they make their transition from child to adult healthcare. Our charity established the first Rare Disease Specialist Nurses in the UK and it’s fantastic to be able to announce this new project as part of Royal Holloway's Rare Disease Day 2021 event where we’ll be speaking about our approach.' said Sophie Dziwinski, Head of Programmes at Roald Dahl's Marvellous Children's Charity.
The collaboration also represents the first StoryLab production to benefit from Enterprise M3’s Creative Tech Growth Booster Award to StoryFutures. James Bennett commented ‘Funding from EM3 will support the project with hardware and audience testbed costs, enabling Play Well For Life’s exciting prototype to be experience by up to 100 seriously ill young people across the country, enabling data on such a user group to be captured at a scale impossible for small companies’.
Rare Disease Day is an international day celebrated in over 100 countries to raise awareness amongst the general public, the clinical community, and decision-makers about rare diseases and their impact on people affected and their families. Royal Holloway, University of London have celebrated the day since 2011 by schools, pupils and members of the public to attend lectures and an exhibition and to get hands-on experience in our labs. This year, Roald Dahl's Marvellous Children's Charity will be in attendance to talk about their work and their collaboration with StoryFutures.
The recorded lectures will be made available via the Royal Holloway Rare Disease Day website after the event.
Play Well for Life are now hard at work creating an immersive prototype that will be piloted with Roald Dahl's Marvellous Children's Charity's specialist nurses and their patients in May 2021.
This project is supported by the Creative Tech Growth Booster Award made available by Enterprise M3 LEP, investing in the UK's Creative Tech economy. Creative Companies from the region have the opportunity to benefit from cutting edge equipment and a unique audience test bed as part of their R&D collaborations with StoryFutures.