June 27, 2011
Technician Adam Forejt's on call to answer patients' gaming and computer questions.
Adam Forejt responds to an urgent page from a nurse on a pediatric unit, where an emergency of sorts is unfolding. A young patient cannot beat a level in the video game Ratatouille. His mouse is down the game’s river in a saucepan and with a paddle, but stuck in a whirlpool. The patient is beside himself. Forejt arrives on the scene and takes control. He shakes the game’s Wii remote. “That’s how you get him to paddle faster, to get out of the whirlpool,” he says, handing back the control. “Your mouse can beat this!”
And it does. “There, you got it,” he tells the relieved child, whose mouse emerges victorious.
Forejt is Hopkins Children’s in-house gaming and patient networking technician. Known as “XbA” (“Xbox Adam”), he helps children and families, and sometimes faculty and staff, when computer gaming systems or hardware doesn’t work. He rattles off some of the games he loads for kids on the hospital’s Xbox 360 systems: Sonic Adventure, Bejeweled, Feeding Frenzy, Hydro Thunder, Sponge Bob, Madden Arcade. “We offer patients up-to-date gaming systems like the ones they might have at home,” he says.
Forejt, who takes care of all the COWS (computers on wheels) on the patients units at Hopkins Children’s, knows them inside and out. He has been building his own computers since the age of 12 and is working to be certified as a Microsoft systems administrator. A “huge gamer,” he understands what gaming means to kids today. “It’s their whole world,” he says. “It’s what they would be doing at home. In here, it helps to relieve stress and anxiety and provide a little normalcy.”
On the patient units, Forejt becomes the face of salvation and calm when systems fail and computer screens go blank. “Their faces light up when you walk in to help them or talk with them or play a game,” he says. “It’s very satisfying to be able to make our kids and families happy.”
Today, Hopkins Children’s gaming systems and computers are portable and wheeled into patients’ room. In the new Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children’s Center, opening next spring, gaming will be integrated in a new system called TigrNet that will also offer TV, video and internet services through flat screens in every patient room. The hope, adds Forejt, is that patients will be able to play computer games with one another via a secure private network.