On my recent pediatric rotation in medical school, I was struck by how many children briefly enter the lives and consciousness of nurses and doctors. This is most apparent in the Emergency Rooms of cities, where many of the children do not have a primary care physician or a stable source of medical care. I also noticed that at Yale-New Haven Hospital all the computers use a basic Microsoft screen saver which runs all day and all night. There are probably 20 flat panel computer screens on each floor or ward of the hospital. After watching an episode of “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” focused on Missing and Exploited children, the television show showed a stream of images of children who are currently missing. I thought about how this attempt was searching for a needle in a haystack: there are 2,000 children a day reported missing across the United States , how can we best get the pictures of the missing kids in front of people who would actually be able to recognize them? Clearly milk cartons are not the answer. I realized that missing and exploited children move around a lot, and probably do not have a family doctor. Therefore, when they get sick or injured they are brought to the emergency room.
I had the idea that if a screen saver was developed with a train of the pictures of recent missing children (does such a thing already exist?) the hospital and ERs would be the perfect place to have it on the computers in the background. All the hospital computers connect to the internet and the screen saver could be updated each week based upon the recent missing children in that region of the country. Nurses and health providers encounter many children each day, and maybe faces would stick out and they would be more likely to recognize missing children. Even on the pediatric floors of the hospital we have computers every few feet and families or hospital staff can maybe identify children they meet in their community.
I do not know any of the technical or legal implications of this idea, but I thought it would be simple enough to develop the technology, and the current screen savers do not serve any higher purpose beyond advertising Microsoft. I brought this idea to several Professors of Pediatrics at Yale who thought my idea was ridiculous and irresponsible. Maybe you will think differently! Why noT!
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Simply brilliant. The Milk Carton screen saver. The technolodgy already exists to have updated landscape/butterfly/etc. screensavers, why not use it for this?
Screen savers work when people are not using the computer... this will not be very effective for that reason. But it is certainly better than nothing in that someone may indeed match a face to a running screensaver on a publicly visible machine.
Indeed. We are just finalizing the process but have a DEMO ready. The cases displayed are pulled directly from the databases NCMEC (the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children) Missing CHildren Screensaver<BR>The idea of rotating this in an ER is excellent.
I'm stunned by the synergy created by this match. I think that there are a lot of very obvious pros to this, although there are a few legitimate cons, too, perhaps. Implementation idea: I'm thinking this would be keyed to one giant database, as SQ_GA is working on. I'd suggest that the random selection algorithm be keyed to proximity of the machine running the program, so that locally missing children get seeded in more often, at first. Of course, the system would still randomly pick images from all over the country/world/whatever, but whenever a local report of a missing child hits, then that particular one gets shown more often in the area where they disappeared, and the frequency slowly decreases over time, to allow the others fair time as well.
There is one hard and one soft problem that I see. The hard problem is exactly what Deeptanshu mentioned: screen savers work when the computer is not actively being used. However, perhaps this could be solved by translating the idea onto a dedicated channel which is then broadcast on some of the TVs throughout the place.
The soft problem I see, and I think this is a soomewhat legitimate objection: it might be emotionally difficult to see a stream of missing children's faces all day long :( This might place another heavy emotional burden on hospital staff. However, I would like to suggest a solution to that: Also seed in success stories (FOUND!), and perhaps have a slider option (still thinking screen saver) that determines the frequency of showing success stories, perhaps capped at 25% or so in order not to undermine the efficiency and purpose of the system. Setting the success rate at high can alleviate some of the emotional burden, while still doing what it does, as well as raise hope, while only the grimmest and most determined heroes could set it at o% (Batman has WORK to do).
Ah, one thing: You'd need a pause/rewind feature: "Oh wait! Go back! I think I've seen that girl! Go back to that last one!"
Missing Children Screensaver is now available for everybody to download. Missing Children Screensaver. Content drawn straigh from the NCMEC. Screensaver is free. Let me know what you think!