StoryFutures and Roald Dahl's Marvellous Children’s Charity, which provides specialist nurses and support to seriously ill children, are excited to announce a new £40,000 StoryLab commission called ‘transition of care through immersive storytelling’.
StoryFutures is a research centre at Royal Holloway that links creative companies with world-class research, promoting growth through immersive technology.
Both partners have come together to offer creative companies in the StoryFutures’ region to the west of London the opportunity to collaborate on an Augmented or Mixed Reality Research and Development (R&D) prototype exploring how immersive storytelling can improve ‘transition of care’.
The initiative adopts a nurse-led approach to innovation in order to develop a prototype capable of supporting seriously ill young people across the UK when moving from child to adult services (referred to as ‘Transition of Care’ in the NHS).
This challenge is rooted in the need to help young people (aged 13 to 16) and their families address the anxieties and concerns they face around transition of care so they fully engage with their illness and its likely impact on their lives as they move into the adult world.
The ambition is to develop a prototype with the demonstrable potential to roll out the initiative to all specialist nurses to support them with their patients transitioning to adult services, even if they do not have a Roald Dahl Transition Specialist Nurse.
On offer for the winning company is a £40,000 (incl. VAT) cash R&D production budget, supported by more than £40,000 in-kind support from StoryFutures and Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity.
Creative companies with experience of one of the following areas are invited to take part:
• Creative use of immersive storytelling
• Use of immersive storytelling for health
• Creative use of Artificial Intelligence
Shortlisted companies will be invited to take part in an open innovation process called ‘StoryLab’ which, over two days, will provide companies with access to key Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity stakeholders, specialist nurses, young people with complex, lifelong illnesses and StoryFutures’ world-leading researchers in psychology, business modelling, storytelling and social history.
Companies will be expected to actively develop against the brief and the StoryLab event will culminate in a pitching session delivered to a panel of the charity’s and StoryFutures’ stakeholders.
StoryLab will take place on 15 and 16 December 2020, with the final pitches to be delivered on 17 December 2020.
One successful company will then be selected to create an R&D prototype to be delivered by April 2021 to be showcased at the Roald Dahl Nurses’ Conference on 21 May 2021.
