AUSTIN, Texas — When Sarah Harbaugh was in labor in January at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan, there was thought from the staff that she could benefit from having virtual reality available in her room in order to help cope with childbirth.
The fourth child for Jim and Sarah Harbaugh came early, and there ultimately wasn’t time to have the wife of Michigan’s football coach try VR in that instance. But the attempt at having her use VR in that situation shows how tied together one of Ann Arbor’s most notable families is with the technology that is helping provide patients at the same hospital with a much-needed escape.
A little more than a month before Sarah Harbaugh gave birth, it was announced that the new Harbaugh Fund with a $50,000 seed donation from the Harbaugh Foundation would support activities led by the hospital’s Child and Family Life team. The first project on the list was virtual reality viewers for young patients, providing Michigan-branded cardboards to hopefully help make their hospital stays better.
Sick kids could use the Michigan VR app created by University of Michigan Athletics to get an immersive look at the Jim Harbaugh-led Wolverines football team. Sports is just a small part of what VR can do, of course.
Google’s Street View can help kids in the hospital take a virtual visit to their homes, or a vacation to Hawaii, or wherever they like. Another app enables them to take pictures of their room and maybe send to a sibling, who can reply with a picture of their room back at home. There’s even a game that has children virtually fighting bad blood cells, encouraging some athletic movements.
Enabling normalized experiences for children at the hospital is personal for the Harbaugh family. Sarah Harbaugh while growing up had a brother who had pediatric cancer and spent a great amount of time at Mott Hospital. As a sibling of a young patient, she spent a good portion of that time in the hospital play rooms and knows what it means for kids there to be able to have some fun and not have the hospital be such a scary place, according to J.J. Bouchard, the patient technology coordinator at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.
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Now one of the most popular VR experiences that the kids have enjoyed is the Super Bowl-themed Puppy Bowl on the Discovery VR app.
“Kids are on there and they put it on, and you know, it’s internet rules,” Bouchard said. “Like cats and puppies are the most exciting thing, and so kids put that on and immediately they’re like, ‘Oh, this is awesome!’ And that’s the great part.”
With the help of the Harbaugh family providing access to virtual reality, C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital is able to set its facility apart and potentially enable a hospital visit to be a better, almost Disney World-like experience despite the awful ailment involved.
“Like when you go home from the hospital, you can brag a little bit like, ‘Yeah, I had fun. I did something cool,'” Bouchard said at the South by Southwest Conference. “This should be a place where people are always smiling.”
Sickness, of course, is horrible.
“But you may also have the most amazing, best experience, life-changing experience, and you should be comfortable and having a good time while doing it,” Bouchard said.
One mother even emailed Bouchard to report that her son smiled for the first time in three weeks after using VR, which can serve as a distraction and a tool for the hospital to use for potential therapeutic benefits.
With Jim’s celebrity and the passion he and Sarah have shown, others have been encouraged to donate to the cause.
“They really just wanted to make sure that whatever we were doing was going to have an impact on the kids in a positive way to just make every day like fun for them,” Bouchard said. “Like that was really their main goal, and then to encourage people to keep donating and helping. The headsets are just the beginning.”