Hospitals can be chaotic and difficult places for patients, as they move between appointments, process high volumes of information, and recover from physical and mental exhaustion. Providing opportunities for sustained focus and relaxation are not only important for making patients feel better, but can potentially improve patient outcomes.

In a new project, we're exploring the extent to which art-based activities can facilitate these outcomes. Through a partnership with Well of Art (a company that offers structured creative experiences for pediatric care), we're examining the use of an app called "Glaze," which is being used to meet the need for therapeutic activities in hospital settings. Focusing on hospitalized youth, our goal is to determine whether Glaze's use is beneficial in reducing stress, promoting calmness and agency, and allowing patients to disengage (at least temporarily) from the concerns of being in a hospital setting. More broadly, we're going to investigate the app's ultimate effects on health outcomes.

The Glaze App

Glaze is a digital platform that translates historical oil glazing techniques into a digital environment. The app allows users to use realistic surfaces and brushstrokes to create artworks — based either on work housed in an institutional collection or on their own images. Glaze emphasizes process over outcome, close observation and focus, and decision-making skills. According to test audiences, the Glaze application encourages concentration and helps alleviate stress.

In addition to being used in schools and museums across the world, the app is now available for use in hospitals. Having already incorporated Glaze into medical university curricula, Well of Art is now working with hospital partners through their Founding Hospital Program to bring the app into clinical settings, and refine and adapt its use for the benefit of hospital-based programming. Well of Art's goal is to use Glaze to restore patients' sense of agency through art-making. As the process of using Glaze is structured, repeatable, and measurable, the app is an ideal site for researching the relationship between art-based activities and patient outcomes.

Knology's Role

At the start of our work, we'll be conducting a review of existing, art-based hospital programming and its effects on children in a hospital setting. This landscape review will also map the metrics used to assess outcomes for art-based interventions. It will also explore their factors that mediate their impact, such as environment, age group, or medium.

We'll then design evaluative methods for a feasibility study. Some of these methods will involve an analysis of usage data from Glaze (including whether, how, and how long people are using it), while others will be administered separately from Glaze, and exist outside of the app. Knology will collect behavioral data on how Glaze is used, gather self-reported data from users, and follow users in real-time as they experience Glaze.

Our investigation will seek to examine the links between use of the Glaze app and feelings of calmness, relaxation for young people, and agency. All of our research will test Well of Art's hypotheses — which are that:

• An authentic process creates focus — the brush and paints behave like real materials, so every gesture leaves a trace slightly different from the one the patient expected.
• Focus sustained across a session becomes flow.
• Flow raises the sense of agency.

To determine the relationship between use of Glaze, agency, and better health outcomes, our study will ask the following questions:

• To what extent does Glaze yield the effects observed from art therapy?
• To what extent does Glaze yield better outcomes (in terms of motivation and mental / physical health) than physical (i.e., non-digital) art therapy and "art on prescription" programs?
• To what extent can the above findings be attributed to specific design optimizations of the Glaze app itself (instead of the "lower entry cost" of using digital art platforms)?

Our research is just getting underway. Please check back here for more info on our findings as the study progresses!

For Further Reading

If you're interested in hospital-based educational interventions, you can learn more about our work with Children's National Hospital, and programs like Science Journeys, Discover SCIENCE with Dr. Bear, and more.

Photos courtesy of Well of Art