#187 2024 · Siemens Healthineers / AREA 23 · Healthcare / medical imagingreframe
Siemens stopped trying to muffle the terrifying noise of an MRI machine and turned it into a robot's voice in a children's audiobook instead
the problem
A frightened child who won't hold still ruins an MRI scan, and sedating them is slow, costly and carries its own risk
background
An MRI scanner works by cycling powerful magnetic gradients that produce loud, jarring mechanical noise — banging, whirring, clanking — for the many minutes a scan takes, and the patient has to lie completely still inside a narrow tube the whole time or the images come out unusable. For a frightened child, that combination routinely fails: motion means a repeated scan or a cancelled one, and hospitals default to sedating or even fully anesthetizing young patients to get a clean image, which adds cost, recovery time and its own clinical risk to what is otherwise a routine diagnostic procedure.
The standard mitigations hospitals already use — child-friendly decorated scanner rooms, noise-cancelling headphones, a parent talking the child through it, cartoons playing beforehand — all treat the machine's noise as something to hide from the child or distract them away from. None of them change what the child actually hears the moment the scan starts, which is still the same frightening banging it was trying to avoid.
the move
Siemens Healthineers and agency AREA 23 built 'Magnetic Stories': audiobooks, written with bestselling children's authors, in which the MRI machine's actual mechanical sounds are woven directly into the plot as sound effects timed to the scanner's real noise sequence — the loud banging becomes a friendly robot's footsteps or a spaceship launching, so the child hears the same sounds the machine always made, but now as part of a story they're following rather than an unexplained threat.
the payoff
The program launched as a pilot across Portugal's CUF private hospital network, where radiology staff reported a marked drop in child anxiety during scans and reduced need to fall back on sedation — Siemens has not published a peer-reviewed clinical figure for the reduction as of this writing, but the pilot's reception was strong enough that the company moved to expand Magnetic Stories into Spain, Germany, Italy and the UK, with plans for real-time AI-generated narration that can sync to any hospital's specific scan sequence.
what came after
Magnetic Stories won the Pharma Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2024 along with multiple Clio Awards and a D&AD shortlist, and AREA 23 was named Cannes' Healthcare Agency of the Year on the strength of the campaign — it is now cited in pediatric-radiology and healthcare-marketing circles as a reference case for redesigning the patient experience around an unavoidable clinical stimulus rather than working around it.
references
- [1]AREA 23 & Siemens Healthineers Transform MRI Experiences for Children with Award-Winning CampaignHealthManagement.org, 2024healthmanagement.org
- [2]Siemens Healthineers' Cannes Grand Prix-winning campaign weaves scary MRI sounds into whimsical stories for kidsFierce Pharma, 2024fiercepharma.com