Sick Kids Pain Squad App

The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto (or SickKids) needed to find a way to encourage their young cancer patients to complete daily reports on their pain. With a little back-up from Canada’s top police dramas, the Sick Kids mobile app made this overwhelming task easy and fun.

Kids were given iPhones with the app, which recruits kids into a ‘pain squad,’ a special force dedicated to hunting down pain. It lets the kids enter in what hurt, when, and which medications seemed to be working. Familiar faces from Canadian police dramas like Rookie Blue and Flashpoint were brought into the hospital to offer words of encouragement. There was even a ‘graduation structure’ put in place that let kids complete certain stages and get ‘promoted.’

Credits

The Sick Kids App was developed at Cundari, Toronto, by chief creative officer Brent Choi, associate creative director/copywriter Cory Eisentraut, associate creative director/art director Mike Sipley, project manager Mike Orr, designer Stuart Thom, developers Ali Asim, Patrick Lee, Jin Kim, producers Carol-Anne Granatstein and Cherie O’Connor, videographers Kawal Singh and Rob Dutchin.