Design and development of a prototype of an interactive hospital room with Kinect

When patients visit hospitals, they tend to develop negative feelings such as anxiety and lack of comfort. This paper uses the techniques of Interaction Design and User-Centered Design with the main objective to ask users about their needs and requirements to develop an interactive hospital room with a natural interaction device like Kinect, so we could achieve a reduction on those negative feelings described previously. This will allow that people could use their voices and a set of body gestures to control basic devices that could be find in a hospital room, making the hospitalization process a different, more comfortable and with more autonomy. Prototypes were developed and evaluated into two stages by people that could use the application potentially. The results show that people agree to use this form of interaction in terms of comfort, performance and utility.