A California hospital's work with "Sesame Street" is helping advance digital health.
Here are six things to know:
1. Children's Hospital Los Angeles recently connected Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces "Sesame Street," with Augment Therapy, a digital health startup the hospital helped develop through its KidsX Accelerator program.
2. "Sesame Street" characters such as Elmo and Cookie Monster appear in Augment Therapy's augmented reality physical therapy mobile app. Kids, for instance, mimic Elmo's movements — say, lifting their arms over their heads — or grab virtual cookies with Cookie Monster. Augment Therapy licenses the use of the characters.
3. This marks the first time "Sesame Street" characters are being used in a healthcare rehabilitation setting, according to Omkar Kulkarni, chief transformation and digital officer of Children's Hospital Los Angeles. The platform is live at several children's hospitals and in testing at Children's Hospital Los Angeles.
4. Physical therapy adoption and engagement among kids have typically been low, Mr. Kulkarni told Becker's. Physical therapists generally send patients home with a sheet of paper of exercises to do at home. Children's Hospital Los Angeles wanted to help create a digital solution. "At least what we can tell so far is that digital plus recognizable characters creates more engagement and more adoption or use of the rehab," he said.
5. Sesame Workshop is looking to get more involved in healthcare. "We are very open to similar opportunities where we can meaningfully use media at scale to play a supplemental or supporting role in healthcare," said Miles Ludwig, vice president of digital media at Sesame Workshop, which also partners with pediatric telehealth company Hazel Health. "We're not an organization that just slaps a character on the wall of a doctor's office; we're here for impact. You might have an opportunity to do something with a single hospital, but if what you do with that hospital is not easily portable to 10 other hospitals, sometimes we have to make tough decisions about whether it actually makes sense for us to engage in those kinds of activities."
6. Mr. Kulkarni and Mr. Ludwig met years ago at a KidsX pitch night at a Google office in Los Angeles. The two kept in touch until they found the right digital health startup for Sesame Workshop. "He's a force, so we're lucky to be connected," Mr. Ludwig said of Mr. Kulkarni.