Mobile health games for sale?

For a long time I’ve wanted to do a post all about mobile phone-based health games.  After all, visit the iPhone App store and you’re bombarded with thousands of choices.  From the complete works of Plato to real estate prices, there’s a little (or a lot) for everyone.  In the healthcare & fitness and medical sections alone, users have 2140+ apps to choose from.  But are there any health games in the app store yet?  Not really.  These are as close to health games as I could find:

• Nike Training Club – Create an avatar, customize your workout, learn new drills, compete with friends.
• Are You Smarter than Your Doctor? – Quiz game that allows you to compete with friends or one-on-one with your doc to show him/her that you know much more than they do.  A fun way to educate patients with questions based on questions posed by real licensed doctors.

But are these the only health game apps?

I decided to take my question to a higher authority–Google.  The result?  Mindless Eating Challenge from the folks at Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab.  Based on the book by Dr. Brian Wansink of the same name, Mindless Eating Challenge is a mobile phone-based health game in which players are tasked with caring for a virtual pet, similar to a Tamgotchi.  The player must follow a variety of health and eating recommendations and verify their actions with photos taken from their phone’s camera.  Here is a example of what to expect from gameplay:

For example, the recommendation “Eat a hot breakfast” would require the player to submit a photo of him/ herself eating a bowl of oatmeal.  Photos and compliance are then judged either by judges or peers.  Based on compliance to these recommendations, the pet or plant changes its appearance and gains features or accessories–a tree might grow taller or grow more leaves or fruit in response.  Alternatively, leaves might fall off if the players performance is poor.  A social portion of the game allows the user to see various depictions of their performance in comparison to the performance of others in their group, as well as of their group in comparison to other groups.  The game is designed so that various features can be easily enabled and disabled so it can be used as a platform from which to conduct research into the mechanisms of mobile persuasion in the context of improving health and well-being.

I spoke briefly with JP Pollak, PhD candidate and participant on the project. He and his team are in the process of submitting findings for publication on their first full study using 70 middle schoolers.  Hopefully we’ll get more details on that soon.