I have never met Dr. Joseph C. Kvedar of Partners HealthCare’s Center for Connected Health, Susannah Fox of Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, or Professor Andy Clark of Edinburgh University face to face in the real world. And yet they have all profoundly changed the way I think about health care’s most vexing problem: how are we going to take care of all these Baby Boomers who are starting to retire and get sick?

Kvedar nicely summarizes this supply and demand problem on one slide in a talk I watched on YouTube; he notes that there are currently 24 million Americans with diabetes, and the rate is increasing 8% every year. One in three Americans over 20 years old have hypertension, and Kvedar wonders where we are going to get all the doctors to care for these patients. His answer is we need to form trusting relationships with technology in a process he terms Emotional Automation.

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I had never heard of Kvedar or the Center for Connected Health until I saw a Fox Twitter link to her blog post about robots, enchanted objects, and networks.  Fox and I follow each other on Twitter, so I read her blog, which included the embedded YouTube video of Kvedar speaking about Emotional Automation. In a way Fox is also responsible for me knowing about Professor Clark’s views on “embodied cognition” and “the extended mind.” One Sunday Fox noted in a tweet that my habit of aggregating the health care news every morning at 5:30 AM was helpful to her and the rest of my twitter tribe. That one pat on the back encouraged me months later to scour the New York Times blogs where I found Professor Clark’s Opinionator blog titled “Out of Our Brains.”

Can technology really solve the supply and demand problem in American health care? Can humans love and trust electronic devices made of glass, silicon and plastic? What can video games teach us about changing behaviors to cope with chronic disease? Should we think about what the explosion of cognitive prosthetics means for our understanding of the interplay between brains, bodies, and the real world where we live?

Our loving relationship with technology.

Many of us have already formed trusting, loving relationships with technology, but we have not really thought through the implications for health care. People love and trust their iPhones and tablet computers because they are extensions of themselves. “It is different now that we carry our second self with us. We think with the objects we love and we love the objects we think with.”

So says MIT’s Sherry Turkle, the pioneering student of evocative subjects. Mark Rolston, chief creative officer of Frog Design, observes that people grieve when they lose a personal electronic device. “You are leaving your brain behind,” he says. I have blogged before about Lois Simmeth, 73, who lives in a Pittsburgh nursing home that provides her with a $6,000 harp seal robot to hold. “I love animals. I know you’re not real but somehow, I don’t know, I love you.” Kvedar observes that humans find it easy and natural to anthropomorphize pet rocks and Tamagotchis. He also states that most of us initially believe that a trusting relationship requires two human beings who interact face to face in the real world.

Philosopher Roger Scruton is not buying my argument that trusting relationships with technology are possible:

“In real life, friendship involves risk. The reward is great: help in times of need, joy in times of celebration. But the cost is also great: self-sacrifice, accountability, the risk of embarrassment and anger, the effort of wining another’s trust. Hence I can become friends with you only by seeking your company. I must attend to your words, gestures and body language, and win the trust of the person revealed in them, and this is risky business…. When I relate to you through the screen there is a marked shift in emphasis. Now I have my finger on the button. At any moment I can turn you off…Of course I may stay glued to the screen. Nevertheless, it is a screen that I am glued to, not the person behind it.”

Tom Chatfield and I are betting Scruton is not addicted to World of Warcraft or WoW as it is fondly called by its 12 million monthly subscribers who pay over $1 billion annually to play this Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) video game. Chatfield in his book Fun Inc.: Why Gaming Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century (New York: Pegasus Books, 2010) describes the WoW social experience as friendly and accessible to both beginners and experts. The story of how Adam Brouwer’s orc warrior Mogwai after 4,500 hours of play became the leader of the guild Adelante with 20,000 gold pieces and the two most powerful weapons in WoW is instructive for those of us who do not play MMO games. Although Brouwer thinks he could sell Mogwai for $10,000 on e-Bay for real world money, his obligations and allegiances to his fellow players won’t allow him to cash out. “The strange thing about Mogwai is that he doesn’t just belong to me. Every item he has got through the hard work of twenty or more other people. Selling him would be a slap in their faces. When I started, I didn’t care about the other people. Now they are the only reason I continue.” (Chatfield)

What video games can teach us about human behavior.

Video games have much to teach us about how to motivate humans to self manage their chronic diseases, and they offer a research tool for large-scale studies of human behavior. Researchers are interested in why video gamers become so absorbed and focused and are able to easily achieve the state of flow usually associated with master musicians and champion athletes. “Gamers are engaged, focused, and happy. How many employers wish they could say that about even a tenth of their work force?” says Edward Castronova of Indiana University. How many doctors wish they could say that about a tenth of their patients managing their chronic illness? A recent Harvard Business Review article concluded “the best sign that someone’s qualified to run an Internet startup may not be an MBA degree, but level 70 guild leader status” in a MMO video game. (Chatfield)

Nicole Lazzaro of the player experience and research company XEODesign has identified four key characteristics of video games that may help explain why the typical American has spent 10,000 hours playing computer games by the age of 21.

1. “Hard fun” entails pursuing a goal that gets more difficult with each level of play and requires the player to use sophisticated strategies and be rewarded for progress.
2. “Easy fun” entails sheer enjoyment of the game and satisfying the player’s need for curiosity and mystery.
3. “Altered states” refers to player reports that video games changed how they felt inside by clearing the mind, eliminating boredom, changing their sense of time, and experiencing a sense of achievement.
4. “The people factor” is important to gamers because they develop relationships with others. Remote interactions with fellow players from all over the world are increasingly taking place through microphones, speakers, and real time conversations as well as in-game interactions. (Chatfield)

Using games to change patients.

These learnings from video games can and are being incorporated into strategies to motivate patients to change behaviors to prevent and live with chronic disease conditions.

Managing a chronic condition is full of failures manifested by high blood sugars and unexpected increases in body weight. Chatfield believes “One of the most profound transformations we can learn from games is how to turn the sense that someone has ‘failed’ into the sense that they ‘haven’t succeeded yet.’” Carnegie Mellon University’s Jesse Schell has described a system of awarding points for everything we do in real life in order to reward healthy behaviors. Lucy Bradshaw of Maxis explains, “You could strive to get the 10-stroke tooth brushing achievement, for instance, and then somehow you would collect all those points and utilize them.” Dr. Jane McGonigal of the Institute For The Future plays the online Chore Wars game in which she and her husband earn real rewards by doing chores in their San Francisco apartment. Anne McLaughlin of North Carolina State University’s Gains Through Gaming Lab says, “To make something into a game, you have to have a goal. You have to create the game. It’s more than just measurement…I know we keep talking about blurring the lines between gaming and reality, but I think it does that, and when it’s for a good cause it’s great.” While some think this is great, even the moderator of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival found it “rather ominous and spooky.”

Video games also offer a research tool for understanding the real time interactions of complex systems involving people. Emergency triage and epidemic management are just two areas where game theory can reproduce complex systems and try out different strategies. Blitz Game Studios is developing a triage game that takes place in an interactive three-dimensional world. One physician favorably compared this approach to the traditional large-scale emergency training with volunteers covered with fake blood. “A virtual world can simulate the noise, the chaos, everything. You could assess, for example, the exact percentage and degree of someone’s burns from the way they looked in a game.” Most importantly such a game allows participants to try out different approaches and see if they work. Epidemiologist Nina H. Fefferman at the 2008 Games for Health Conference stated that studying thousands of people in games could model the unpredictable human behavior in epidemics. (Chatfield) Castronova says, “One reason that policy keeps screwing up – think Katrina – is because it never gets tested. In the real world, you can’t create five versions of New Orleans and throw five hurricanes at them to test different logistics. But you can do that in virtual environments.” Chatfield observes, “Game technologies excel at nothing so much as scoring, comparing and rewarding progress.”

Therapists are now using digital worlds with autonomous, virtual humans to help patients work through social anxiety, drinking, gambling, post-traumatic stress, and agoraphobia. Such therapists can discuss the patient’s feelings at the very moment that the virtual bartender asks the alcoholic if he wants to order another drink, and different coping techniques can be practiced time and time again in virtual situations that are experienced as real. One such patient said, “I just think it’s a fantastic idea to be able to experience situations where you know that the worst cannot happen. You know it’s controlled and gradual and yet feels somehow real…the great thing about it [is]…you get to practice.” USC psychologist Albert Rizzo has helped veterans with post-traumatic stress by using a virtual Humvee scenario that recreates ambushes by insurgents. “We can control the intensity of experience, and then work on the patient’s response,” breaking the association between reminders of the ambush and the panic the patient has been dealing with months later. In a USC study, people with social anxiety confessed more of their personal flaws, fears and fantasies to virtual figures programmed to be socially sensitive than to live therapists conducting video interviews.

Kvedar, who first introduced me to the concept of Emotional Automation, cites Karen the virtual wellness coach/avatar who gets her human walkers to exercise more and the Boston hospital patients who prefer a robot discharge planner to a human one as examples of humans learning to trust technology. And why shouldn’t the patient prefer the robot that is not in a hurry, does not talk down to the patient, and encourages the patient to ask the same question over and over again. The busy human discharge planner may in this setting be less effective than the avatar.

The term avatar comes from Sanskrit and is usually translated as incarnation or descent to describe the process in which a higher spiritual being (Rama or Krishna, for example) takes on mortal flesh. It is now commonly used to describe a player’s presence within a video game. (Chatfield) Palo Alto Research Scientist Nick Yee, PhD has described the Proteus Effect, how our video game avatars change how we behave in virtual environments and in real life. In several papers, Yee demonstrated that players given more attractive or taller avatars disclosed more personal information and bargained more aggressively than unattractive, shorter avatars. Yee also showed that the person’s perceptions of their own attractiveness persisted outside of the game environment to affect their participation in real life online dating. Yee believes that providing users with “fit, athletic avatars in exergames may encourage longer and more engaged exercise sessions than if they were provided with normal-looking avatars or avatars that were modeled from their own bodies.”

Games, brains, bodies, and the real world.

Finally, what does all this do for our understanding of the interplay between brains, bodies, and the real world where we live? Professor Clark who works in “embodied cognition” and “the extended mind” fields of philosophy argues that a wire-free interface that links our brains to our notepad or iPhone should count as providing support for our cognitive processing. Basically, I think he is saying that some of the activity that enables us to think occurs outside of our brain. He cites studies that show that hand gestures may play an active role in our ability to think; when research subjects were prevented from using hand gestures, they perform poorly on tests of mental abilities. He provocatively notes “evolution and learning don’t give a jot what resources are used to solve a problem. There is no more reason, from the perspective of evolution or learning, to favor the use of a brain-only cognitive strategy than there is to favor the use of canny (but messy, complex, hard-to-understand) combinations of brain, body, and world.”

I have never spoken to Kvedar, Fox, or Clark face to face in real life, and yet they have indirectly convinced me that patients in the future will trust and use technology to prevent and treat illness in ways that we are just starting to understand and envision. The supply and demand problem of taking care of retiring Baby Boomers will include robots, avatars, video games, and physicians.

Currently, ROC gamers encounter situations designed to help them make new friends and handle peer pressure, stress, and anxiety in healthy ways. They learn about self-confidence and anger management as well as strategies to apply in situations that encourage drug use.

While researchers are still administering online surveys to collect more information, data from the Swinburne University eTherapy Unit’s evaluation is available for review. This evaluation is presented and analyzed by Kerrie Shandley and two other faculty members from the Swinburne University of Technology.

Purpose of ROC

The designers of ROC intended to use cognitive-behavioral principles to assist young people in the identification and development of practical coping skills for dealing with life stressors that might otherwise contribute to the development of mental health problems.

The game also has a mood component that must be increased to promote easier progress, so ROC is both preventative and therapeutic in terms of mental health.

Role-play encourages gamers to both learn life skills for good mental health and apply them offline. Skills like problem-solving, challenging negative beliefs, and negotiating relationships are emphasized in the game.

Gamer Responses to ROC

A qualitative survey was administered to ROC participants four weeks after a trial version of the game was released. The survey consisted of only two questions and encouraged gamers to select at least one pre-scripted response to each question, but also included a text box for open comments. 154 ROC players were asked to identify what they liked most about the game and what they liked least about it.

• Game play, which was described on the survey as including interactivity, response options, choices, storyline, characters, and fun, was identified by 44.8% of players as the best part of ROC. Other top aspects of ROC included informative and educational components (31.2%); game design components like interface, music, and graphics (26%); and the realistic and relatable nature of the game (19.5%).
• The characteristic of ROC that players identified as being the least satisfactory was its usability at 36.4%.  58.9% of gamers who wanted to see improved usability cited technical issues (such as navigation, bugs, screen resolution, accessing the website, and logging in) as the worst problems, while the remaining 41.1% experienced difficulty with instructions, directions, and objectives.
• Interestingly, the runner-up for least favorite aspect of ROC was game play, which was selected as the best thing about the game. 27.9% of players found game play to be deficient in terms of storyline, length of the game (too short), response options, pace (too slow), and number of locations and scenarios (too limited).

Recommendations for Future Mental Health Games

Based on the responses collected thus far from ROC gamers, Shandley and her team have developed a list of considerations for future mental health game designers who want to focus on preventative and therapeutic components.

• Keep uploads and downloads to a minimum and limit updates as much as possible.
• Allow gamers to customize their experiences as much as possible in order to give them a heightened sense of control and increased identification with characters.
• Make sure that directions and objectives are clear. One specific way to do this is to ensure that players know when an objective has been completed, leaving no doubts about what to do next. This also gives players a sense of accomplishment.
• Debug the game as much as possible prior to its release. With serious games, the stakes are higher, and bugs can influence players to quit without giving it a second thought. To make sure that everyone who wants to learn from the game can enjoy it, debugging is an essential priority.

About the Author

Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education performing research surrounding online universities and their various program offerings. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

HealthGAMERS is pleased to introduce you to Greg Kendall, President and CEO of Kendall & Son Solutions LLC. Greg has begun a family game development business which has plunged straight into mobile gaming for health. His company’s first game is called Allergies Attack and it gives players a chance to get back at all of those allergies for just $0.99, available now in the iPhone Apps Store.

The interview.

HG: Describe the general gameplay of Allergies Attack. What is the win/lose proposition?

GK: Allergies Attack follows a little boy named Richard through his dream of getting back at his allergies.  The opening story shows Richard’s mother trying to explain why he can’t go on a field trip, and as Richard begins to fall asleep, he starts imagining what he might be missing.  The game play is arcade-like with Richard in an anti-histamine pill-shaped jet, shooting his allergies as they appear on the various scenes.  Eliminate the remaining enemies, and you move on to the next of six levels of play where your allergens can be fish, dairy, gluten or peanuts.

HG: I understand that your sister inspired the creation of this game. How was development guided by her personal health experiences?

GK: Both my father and I, as well as my other older sister Erica, are asthmatics.  It was ironic that as a small child, Jessica showed no signs of asthma or any other allergies.  However, in college, we watched my sister develop severe adult-onset food allergies, most notably an allergy to soy.  We quickly learned that soy is virtually in every type of prepared food product on the grocery shelf.  We watched her frustrations grow, as we all discovered just how widespread the use of soy is in the foods we eat everyday.  When we began planning our company and creating our mission statement, we quickly decided to begin by developing a fun and entertaining game for the tens of millions of people around the world to attack back at their allergies.

HG: Where can our readers obtain the app and how much does it cost?

GK: Allergies Attack is available on Apple’s App Store, and additional information on the game can be found on our website.

On his health game mission.

HG: We have seen the concept of “fighting back” in other popular health games like HopeLab’s Re-Mission for young cancer patients undergoing treatment.  Do you feel you’re taking a similar approach–empowering the player?

GK: I would say that we are taking a similar approach as Re-mission by empowering the player to attack back.  Often the afflicted feel hopeless and not in control, but with these games they are given a fun way to deal with their issue even if just for a short time.

HG: What do you hope to accomplish by releasing the game to the public?

GK: We hope that Allergies Attack will increase awareness of food allergies, that it is a serious issue that millions of people have to be conscience of everyday.  Without generating downloads the game will not promote awareness, so they are dependent on each other; synergy. Additionally, promoting awareness creates a drive for research to ultimately find a cure.  We therefore will be making a donation towards allergy research, education, and advocacy.

HG: You said that you specifically hope your game will increase awareness about food allergies, yet the character Richard is combatting his peanut allergies by shooting antihistamines.  Most know that avoiding peanut consumption is the safest way to avoid horrible food allergy reactions like anaphylaxis. Does this mean your health game is purely for fun and not about sending specific allergy-related messaging or pharma-focused messaging?

GK: If a person has severe allergies, anaphylaxis can be induced by any of the foods depicted in Allergies Attack.  We are not trying to convey a pharma-focused or accurate treatment plan through our game play.  If we can provide a fun outlet for allergy sufferers and get one person who is not afflicted by allergies to Google “how many people suffer from food allergies” then we are successful.

On business and development.

HG: Who did the programming and design of Allergies Attack?

GK: Allergies Attack was designed and produced by Kendall & Son Solutions LLC.

HG: Is this Kendall & Son Solutions’ first game? How did you get into this business?

GK: This is Kendall & Son Solutions’ first game.  It all started with a discussion we had during Thanksgiving about allergies and technology. It all did not come to fruition until a couple of months later when my sister with food allergies became pregnant.  During her last trimester, she was put on bed rest and needed assistance getting groceries, cooking etc. Being allergic to many foods, we needed to be careful of what we bought and cooked for her.  My father and I then developed our first basic application Am I Allergic, which is an allergen thesaurus.   For example, if a person is allergic to egg they most likely would be allergic to livetin, an egg protein.  Am I Allergic was originally intended for our family’s personal use, but then we decided that we wanted to publish it in the App Store in the hope that it could be helpful as it was to us.  After that, Kendall & Son Solutions was born.

HG: How long did it take to develop Allergies Attack?

GK: My father and I spent four months of nights and weekends designing and developing the game.

HG: Why did you choose the iPhone platform?  Were there any challenges associated with using the iPhone?

GK: We felt the iPhone platform had the most mature development environment as well as a very sizable market for distribution of our games and applications.

HG: How long has the game been live?  Has it been doing well in the App Store?

GK: The game has only been live in the App Store for a couple days and we will still be working hard to promote the game and having the rest of the world. Join us in attacking back!

HG: What can we expect from Kendall & Son Solutions down the road?

GK: The future looks bright for Kendall & Son Solutions.  We currently are in development and pre-development of a number of games that above all are fun and exciting to play but also champion an issue.  These issues will include health, social and environmental issues that the world is facing today.

Other allergy and flu health games on healthGAMERS.

• Interview: Nasonex’s “Don’t Blow It” Allergy Game
• The Great Flu: Global Pandemic
• Gaming the Flu: Having fun with H1N1

According to Dr. Fiellin:

The goal of our project is to provide young teens the opportunity to practice and acquire skills in order to avoid or reduce their risk behavior. The hope is that this reduction in risk would then translate to preventing new cases of HIV.

From the rest of the interview, I picked up on some key points about health games as they relate to diseases such as HIV/AIDS:

• Young teens are already engaged in game play
• Games allow for repeated practice and play
• Highly engaging (if designed well)
• Portability – can be applied to various mobile platforms
• Opportunities to improve knowledge, prevention efforts and increase adherence
• Global application increasing

Although we don’t have an official name for the game just yet, I’m looking forward to seeing what the folks over at Yale come up with as far as design. Last year, we highlighted a game called +Click that looked at helping HIV positive teenagers make positive choices. Hopefully this will motivate other groups to think outside the box with this disease.

The Twitter message I saw from Manny had to do with a Facebook game that the DHF partnered with other organizations to develop: HealthSeeker. With the help of the Joslin Diabetes Center and Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, HealthSeeker (designed by Ayogo Games, Inc.) launched to join the movement of healthy gaming. One of the things I like about this concept is how easily it integrates into your Facebook experience. The social gaming movement for healthy behavior change is still in its infancy but is gaining traction with projects such as Get Up and Move headed up by Jen McCabe and her Contagion Health company (oh yeah and they are hiring).

Check out the HealthSeeker video to get a bit more familiar with the platform:

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I love seeing how connecting with your own peers/friends is the concept of social gaming for health. For more information on the game, check out this post from Manny’s blog.

The hidden 1200 kcal !

Since that time many efforts have already been made to try to change the slope of the overweight and obesity curves. Although it is believed that daily caloric intake should be around 2,500 kcal for moderately active men and high active women, it has been estimated that the average American ingests 3,748 kcal per day.

In fact, this excessive portion intake  in the American population might come from eating more because the environment is offering more than necessary. According to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and its Obesity Education Initiative this “portion distortion” has grown in size and energy in the last twenty years at a horrific trend. The size of a bagel has doubled and the weight of French fries portion has tripled!

If you add up all these distortions, it is no surprise that this additional 1,200 kcal would be quite hard to eliminate by physical activity since it corresponds to about 4 hours of cycling …. and result in gaining weight and all the complications that are associated.

Don’t blame it on me !

Indeed, the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) has issued in 2007 the revised version of the American Plate that includes more low calories food and a significant reduction of animal proteins. Not to mention what unnatural molecules are found in meat and other food products, the reduction of portion was not accompanied by a recommendation of reduction in dish sizes resulting in the same visual perception of a plate and what size and height it should have.

In a scientific study published in the Obesity Research Journal in that same year (2007), Clemson and Penn State University scientists have studied who establishes restaurant portion sizes and factors that influence these decisions and examined this in a survey that included 300 chefs their opinions regarding portion size. Executive chefs were identified as being primarily responsible for establishing portion sizes served in restaurants and 76% of them thought that they served “regular” portions, the actual portions of steak and pasta they reported serving were 2 to 4 times larger than serving sizes recommended by the U.S government.

It’s not so easy to just blame overweight and obese people when there are numerous accomplices in this nutritional crime.

Play the plate

I believe education can make a huge difference in our portion size problem, especially for children, by creating health games and educational activities that might help better consider regular or normal proportions and use the corresponding dishware to achieve good and balanced intake. In fact, some quizzes or recommendations are available on the Net to draw attention on the portion distortion effects.

On the games side, many are found to address the right food balance but few if any were found to specifically address the problem of size portion and to educate kids on the space and time dimension of portion.

Considering the above-mentioned scientific articles, there is room for such computer and video games that can address specifically the visual perception of a normal or adapted food portion and certainly the duration aspects of eating.

Small is beautiful

In conclusion, instead of only focusing on the public to manage its problems with the help of social and healthcare community, strong incentives could also be issued toward the food industry and dishware industrials to change their habits and products, and participate to this worldwide challenge of war against obesity.

For example, a reduction of the dinner plate size would normally result in :

• lowering the price of menu and make it accessible to more people
• lowering the amount of leftover food that has to be thrown way
• lowering the price of house dishware
• lowering the generated pollution on non-used and discarded material
• changing the size perception of portions

Battle the Sperminator.

Adventures in Sex City is an online health game designed to teach teens about birth control, relationships, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), pregnancy, and general sexual health.  Teens must go up against Sperminator, a former superhero who’s infected by a STI and doesn’t seek treatment.  Please note this game is for teens and adults only.  The artwork is definitely not for little kids.

In the dark of the night, Sex City is in a panic because of the terrible Sperminator whose sole mission is to infect all citizens with various sexually transmitted infections.  Who do you call?  The Sex Squad!  An elite team of superheroes dedicated to keeping the citizens of Sex city safe from STIs.  It’s up to you to help the Sex Squad stop the Sperminator and save Sex City.

The goal of the game is to answer a series of sex-based questions using one of the Sex Squad super heroes.  Teens can go up against the sinister Sperminator using one of four characters:

1. Wonder Vag – a pro-abstinence virgin
2. Willy The Kid – a short guy that joined the squad to prove size doesn’t matter
3. Power Pap – a sexually active girl that’s already had a close encounter with a STI
4. Captain Condom – a scientist whose condom-perfecting experiment went awry resulting in his half man half condom appearance.

Get a trivia question correct and you can deflect the Sperminator’s infected  sperm with your rubber condom shield.  Get it wrong and be prepared to be shot by the Sperminator’s sexual projectile arms. You won’t find the game mechanic revolutionary, but I found the comic book style to be compelling, the characters amusing, and the questions informative.

And if that doesn’t amuse you…

If you need a really good laugh, may I suggest checking out some of the MLHU’s collection of condom commercials.  This is definitely better than reading a pamphlet.  Congratulations to MLHU for their creative efforts to deliver sexual health information to teens!

But that’s not all.  Microsoft hopes to get its Xbox 360 in on the game as well (pun intended).  According to a recent article by CNET,  Microsoft hopes to take advantage of the Xbox’s low price by having hospitals use it in place of their typical feed and filter electronic medical records equipment.  This information came straight from Microsoft Senior Researcher Desney Tan who spoke about plans to expand the HealthVault system at the Microsoft forum on healthcare technology in Beijing.

Xbox units could also be used to let patients play games or go online, possibly by body gestures enabled by Microsoft’s upcoming Project Natal control system. Microsoft Research is also developing applications that can plug into services such as HealthVault to make it easier for users to access their health records. One such project, MyLife for Windows Mobile phones, is using built-in devices such as cameras, accelerometers, and microphones in the hopes of enabling users to log various health readings, from blood pressure to body weight, and monitor activities from exercising to eating.

Maybe one day we will all be playing on Xbox 360s at the doctor’s office instead of filling out paper-based forms with a clipboard. You can stay on top of the latest at HealthVault and its medical partners by visiting their news section.  If you’ve used HealthVault or have a provider that does we’d love to hear your thoughts!

“It surprises most people to learn that pneumonia kills more children than any other disease – taking more than 2 million young lives annually,” writes former U.S. Senate Majority Leader and Save the Children Board member Bill Frist, MD. [Reuters]

Save the Children, a leading organization focused on improving the lives of children around the world, recently launched their Survive to 5 campaign. This campaign highlights the pressing needs of children around the world who do not survive past their 5th year of life because of the factors that affect their health.

On November 2nd, Save the Children launched the Mission Pneumonia online quiz game to help people get the facts on childhood pneumonia. “Although childhood pneumonia is a serious issue, we wanted to create a fun and interactive way through Mission: Pneumonia for people of all ages to get involved and make a difference,” says Mary Beth Powers – Chief of the Survive to 5 campaign.

The quiz game consists of 7 different levels, each with a number of questions related to pneumonia. As players progress through the levels and answer questions correctly, they are offered opportunities to take action such as sharing what they learn with friends/family through Twitter and Facebook or even  by signing a petition to Congress in support of legislation to expand life-saving health measures to more mothers and children in poor countries.

I think this is a big draw to the future of these types of games where the main goal is to impart knowledge to the player about a specific issue. The tie-in of actionable links is a smart move because you already have the user there on the screen – as they become more aware of the issue, they may be more inclined to move forward with an activity that engages real world constituents.

Another aspect of the game that makes it even more personal is that at the end of each level, players are introduced to real community health workers that are making a difference in their communities after being trained by Save the Children to diagnose pneumonia in children.

Definitely looking forward to more interactive ways to increase education around health issues as well as to spur real world action!

Recently, we came across another game that focuses on influenza – this time giving you the ability to control how an outbreak is treated. The game is simply entitled: The Great Flu.

Basically you have the option of five different outbreak scenarios with accompanying virus names (the ‘Gamers Flu’ sounds particularly nasty!). Each scenario has an increasing level of difficulty. The goal of the game is to prevent a pandemic from happening – pretty much what happened this year with H1N1. You have a limited budget to add to the reality.

What I like about this type of game is that it really gives individuals a sense of what public health officials do to prevent this type of crisis from happening. The first flu game we highlighted gave you an idea of prevention on a micro level – The Great Flu gives you a very macro level view of outbreak prevention.

Under the “Learn More” tab, you get a scientific introduction and tutorial about the influenza virus and how a primarily animal-based virus can sometimes leap species and affect humans.

We had a lot of fun with this game and plan on trying out each difficulty setting. How well do YOU prevent worldwide outbreak?