For the past week we’ve been strategizing about the audiovisual materials we hope to build to demonstrate the ideas of standardizing patient preparation, instruction and coaching, including several different types of incentive screens – typically modeled on what we’ve seen in the marketplace.

During a meeting last week with Charlotte – a French student spending a year in Madison who is pitching in to help make the short clips we’ll need -the students came up with some exciting new ideas about the incentive screen.

For example, Jeremy G raised the possibility of making the screen more competitive – taking a game approach a step further.

The discussion led me to wonder whether we could create a competitive animation where the opponent depicted the student’s own predicted values (the expected values for someone of the same age, sex and height).

Charlotte suggested that we think about creatively trying to exploit and encourage the patient to model the behavior of a person demonstrated in the video.

In general, I’ve recently been wondering whether incentive screens might be better seen as something for everyone doing spirometry, rather than just for kids.

Andrew D had done some reading about incentive screens and drew our attention to a debate in the literature about their efficacy. Surprisingly, it turns out that the efficacy of incentive screens hasn’t actually been very well evaluated.

The series of articles he found reveal a small but healthy debate within the respiratory community about whether traditional incentive screens and computer animations improve the quality of measurements in young children – and which parts of the maneuvers they actually affect (effort, reproducibility).

I’ve posted some of Andrew’s comments in the wiki along with links to the articles in the resources area of the wiki. We’d love to hear what others think about the value of the incentive screens, and stimulate some discussion about innovative ways to improve their utility.

Please let us know what you think about the ideas for the incentive screens or suggest some of your own. We’re keeping a list in the wiki and will start build something in the next week or two.