New Media for New Organs

This article describes an eight-month pilot study in which 19 pediatric post-transplant patients at Children’s Hospital Boston, ages 11 to 15, used a computer-based psychosocial intervention developed on the Zora 3D multiuser environment. Zora provides tools to create an online virtual city and populate it with houses and personally-meaningful objects. Users can communicate with each other via real-time chat and participate in open-ended guided activities to create a social network of peers. Preliminary results support the idea that innovative technologies can help adolescent patients to create a support network of peers when face-to-face interactions are impossible.