'Now We Are Going on a Journey': Meaning-Making with a Healthcare Game during Toddlers' Medical Treatment

This study explores how toddlers and caregivers make meaning with an interactive healthcare game on a tablet during medical treatment. The data material consists of video recordings of six nebuliser treatments of two children. Using a social semiotic perspective and a multimodal analysis, the study identifies how children and caregivers make meaning with the game, defined as a multimodal text, through creating text events. The findings illustrate how the participants' meaning-making in the text events appears to have a narrative and an analytical orientation. It is suggested that the potential of healthcare games lies in the creation of text events where the game constitutes a shared focus. When children and caregivers share their meaning-making orientations, the medical treatment can be brought into the background.