The research. The American Council on Exercise (ACE) is a 25-year-old nonprofit dedicated to promoting the benefits of physical activity and protecting consumers against unsafe and ineffective health and fitness products, programs and trends.  They have done extensive research on exercise regiments...

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation continues to support health games research. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) just announced that more than $1.85 million in grants for research that will offer unprecedented insight into how digital games can improve players’ health behaviors and outcomes. With...

Beginnings of a mobile health game movement? In my last post on mobile phone-based health games, I gave you an overview of Mindless Eating Challenge, a game by Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, funded in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as part of their health games research initiative. ...

Serious health games are gaining interest among the medical and scientific communities. In order to estimate this interest, I have checked in the American National Library of Medicine bibliographic database MEDLINE using the Pubmed Service search engine (world largest bibliographic life sciences and...

The novel Nanoswarm: Invasion From Inner Space was published today, a work based on the NIH-funded multi-million dollar health game of the same name.  Nanoswarm is a first person, role-playing videogame adventure in healthy eating and exercise.  The game is designed to change nutrition and physical...

At-Risk, a game designed to train university faculty in identifying, approaching, and referring students who exhibit signs of mental distress, was recently assessed in a national study at 42 universities across the U.S.  Findings for the study reveal the game’s effectiveness in improving users’...

Can this new report change the field? For those even remotely interested in health games, the newest report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, “Game Changer: Investing in digital play to advance children’s learning and health,” is a must read.  The basic conclusion of the report is...

Today, most of the health games, whether they are made for children or for adults, are based on digital drawings. The main character could be a representation of the player, i.e. an avatar, or a small figure like an animal or a monster. These games often are centered around an assigned mission for the...

Some time ago, Bob Coffield of the Health Care Law Blog, brought to my attention a project that was going on in his home state of West Virginia. Since the launch of the pilot activity in 2004, West Virginia University (WVU) has been implementing a program to help put DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) into...

France is a very paradoxical country.  Recognized for its rich and highly caloric foods, is a great paradox that France has a low prevalence of cardiovascular diseases. It is interesting to study the game market, especially health games, where the existing French health system is often considered by...