Multimedia content for Multiple Sclerosis

Living with a disease is difficult, but when you have the support of your family and friends, it makes the hard times easier to deal with. I chose this story on a bike team called Carpe Diem, who are riding for Andrea Guerrero, a San Antonio woman with multiple sclerosis. MS is a disease that affects the central nervous system. My mother went through a bout with cancer after I was born and she always emphasized how my father’s support helped her make it through. I could relate my mother’s experience with Guerrero’s, who has children and is struggling to cope with her disease. Carpe Diem is riding in Valero MS 150 Bike Tour, which helps raise money for MS research. The team consists of Guerrero’s friends, who she through her childcare business, which she is unable to run anymore because of her MS. Her husband will also ride in the tour, but with another team. The bike tour will begin at the AT&T Center in San Antonio and end in Corpus Christi.

I was surprised the story had no multimedia because there are many things that can make it more interactive. The easiest multimedia content the Express-News could have added was a map outlining the route of the bike tour. It could include an infobox on the map which gives the dates of the tour, who is sponsoring it and a legend. The map can have mark stars with each of the stops that will be taken on the tour by riders. At each stop, which I assume it will be a city or town, when the mouse rolls over the star, it could bring up a box with statistics showing the number of people living with MS in that area.


Another piece of multimedia I would include is a video clip showing a day in the life of Guerrero. The story provides details about how it is a struggle for Guerrero to do things such as going to grocery store or shopping for her children’s school clothes. It could begin with Guerrero getting up in the morning, getting herself and children ready for school and then how she goes through her day to day. There could be shots of Guerrero doing exercises, taking medication or planning her diet to deal with her MS. More importantly, it could show how her family keeps things together through efforts such as the “believe” maxim her daughter began, which appears throughout their home, according to the story.

The third piece of multimedia content could be a graphic showing how to do exercise that alleviate pain associated with MS. The National MS Society has an illustrated manual on their Web site with stretching exercises beneficial to those suffering from the disease. I would include three different stretching exercises, one on the neck and shoulders, another on arms and the last on legs, which would cover most of the body. I would have the graphic show each exercise with numbered steps with a small description under each illustration explaining what to do. I would include a link to the illustrated manual at the bottom if people want to learn more exercises.

The last piece of multimedia would feature an interactive graphic of a person who suffers from MS. It would be like a video game, in the sense that you can move the person around, but it would basically be a graphic that moves. Initially, the person would be shown as a someone who was just diagnosed with the disease. The user could have the person trying to do the dishes or pick up a box in their home and showing how they become fatigued faster or feel pain in their arms or legs. When the pain becomes to great after the person attempts to do the activity, a screen can come up which shows the central nervous system of that person. It can give a breakdown of what is happening internally to nervous and signals that are being sent to the person’s brain. Then it could show someone with a the disease more progressed, who is trying to comb their hair or get dressed in the morning. Once again, when the person gets too exhausted and in pain to continue their activity, the screen will give another breakdown of what is happening to the person internally.