Non-pharmacological sedation using smart cell phone download children music during echocardiographic imaging

Background: It is always a challenge to perform echocardiographic imaging in infants and young children. Traditionally, young children and children needed medicines to sedate them during echocardiography. The purpose of this study is therefore to develop and demonstrate a new method to quiet-down the infants and young children. Methods: Between September 1 and Jan 31, a total of 75 young infants and children received intended complete echocardiography. Their ages ranged between 4 months to 4 years. There were 40 males and 35 females. All of them had various indications for echocardiographic examinations . The infants younger than 4 months are excluded because often a pacifier is adequate to achieve quiet examination. Children elder than 4 years are also excluded because they are often cooperative enough without additional means to achieve technically satisfactory echocardiographic examination. Results: There were totally 72 echocardiographic examinations performed during this period performed by the authors. Smart cell phone with downloaded children's songs playing with cartoon motion pictures was placed in front of the patients with the eye-phone distance about 35-75 cm. We found that 66/72(92%) of the occasions the patients can be kept quiet without addition of real drugs while just view the motion pictures and listening to the kid songs. Adequate sedation was defined as cooperativeness of the patients without crying or irritability during the examination. Conclusions: Our result demonstrated that adequate sedation without real drugs could be achieved by smart cell phone playing with downloaded kids music along with motion pictures. This new concept of non-pharmacologic sedation allows more convinent and effective performance of the echocendiographic examination. The new method of non-pharmacologic sedation is not only effective but also very acceptable for parents.