Zen Chu
The largest healthcare institutions in America want to leverage game developers and entertainment to help patients and promote wellness.
That’s one of the takeaways from the fifth year of the Games For Health conference.
Over three days, more than 400 attendees hailed from a convergence of game developers, academic institutions and many of the largest health companies and philanthropies. The most popular games that encourage movement and weight loss (Nintendo’s Wii, EA’s Active, Harmonix’ Rock Band and Dance Dance Revolution) anchored the demonstrations with new sensors to measure activity, heart rate and weight.
A collection of niche games addressed cognitive skill measurement, Parkinson’s therapy, childhood diabetes education, physical rehabilitation and addiction education. These focused games demonstrated that healthy educational games can’t have meaningful health impact or economic success unless they’re fun for extended gameplay.
Explicit games on the traditional gaming platforms provided most of the sparks. However, implicit game dynamics in data gathering, online interactions and patient engagement provided an important theme throughout the conference. These non-obvious game dynamics (for example, ratings, leaderboards, viral spread, collections, reinforcement schedules) can have powerful effects on behaviors. The hope is that new gaming psychology and techniques can help improve some of the toughest and expensive healthcare issues: Medication compliance and adherence, smoking cessation, obesity, wellness education and disease prevention.
Humana, the large health benefits company and a sponsor of the conference, announced a game idea competition to encourage video game designers to create more health-oriented games.
“We aren’t looking for traditional games,” said Grant Harrison, vice president of consumer innovation at Humana. “We want entries that get people to move more and live a healthier lifestyle. Since we want people to actually play these games, ideas need to be fun but also have a health benefit.”
SimQuest, a maker of some of the most advanced medical simulation software and training systems, described its open surgical training simulator and pandemic flu training programs. The importance of simulation games became apparent in the company’s combat trauma simulators, which can train medics and military personnel for situations that typical tourniquets used with mannequins cannot replicate. Their extensive multi-year funding from the Department of Defense, National Insitutes of Health and other government agencies attests to the importance of game technology for teaching surgeons and other medical professionals, beyond the consumer realm.
Many of the attendees and presenters argued that the nascent industry is only now poised for rapid growth. One of the keynote presenters and former Health Hero Network CEO Steve Brown, titled his presentation “iPhone, Android, Open Source, Cloud, App Store, Augmented Reality: The Games for Health Ecosystem is Finally Here!”
Unlike the previous era of single-player games, the rapidly evolving infrastructure now allows networked and mobile handheld games to be rapidly and cheaply deployed. Game development platforms and virtual worlds allow for rapid game development and players to self-assemble into interest groups.
But the question remains:
How will patients, healthcare providers and communities use these tools to engage with each other and will it actually benefit health?
