James Watt, PhD is a serious games researcher at the University of Connecticut. He explains that social interaction is relative to masked identity. Group communication is best when there is also social interaction. So how about creating an avatar-likeness with body movements that still provides anonymity? Microsoft Xbox recently released Avatar Kinect that scans participants and then creates a general look-alike avatar of themselves – including body movements.

Players might not mind sharing personal attributes with friends, but would players feel comfortable revealing their size, hair color, and mannerisms to strangers, too? This remains to be seen, as medical professionals brainstorm about health applications. Consider in-home avatar group therapy sessions, patient education classes, addiction support groups, or parent clubs. Now layer on a health gaming twist. How about a virtually engaging game of Nutrition Jeopardy? The possibilities are tremendous! What kind of avatar health games do you envision? This field is wide-open for development. Game on!

Back in 2010 we were introduced to the “Wii-killer,” aka the Kinect for Xbox 360.  Microsoft’s initial lineup of exergames revealed great health gaming potential. Others, such as Dr. Bill Crounse who writes for the Microsoft Health blog, speculated that the Kinect could be used in healthcare for even bigger purposes due to its set of special characteristics. This includes:

• Hands-free controls
• Advanced motion-sensing
• Voice recognition
• Facial recognition
• Data collection through a simple Internet connection

Innovative uses in medicine.

Innovators in the medical community have been able to take these special characteristics and far surpass initial expectations for the ways the Kinect can be used in healthcare. I doubt that Microsoft expected their new controller-free gaming device to have such an impact in such a variety of ways. Here are just some of the many examples:

• Diagnose disorders in children: The National Science Foundation has funded Minnesota’s Medical, Science and Engineering, and Education and Human Development Colleges to use the Kinect sensor to detect abnormal movements in children which may indicate health problems like autism, attention-deficit disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder.
• Save time in the operating room: Surgeons at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital are using Kinect sensors to access, rotate, zoom, and manipulate medical images during surgery without leaving the operating room.
• Increase effectiveness of patient-physician interactions – Jin Joo Lee of the Personal Robotics group at MIT Media Lab is using the Kinect to detect nonverbal cues. This can greatly enhance clinicians’ abilities to detect unnoticed patient needs via body language and facial expressions.
• Manipulate 3D CT images hands-free: Doctors at the Center for Biomolecular Imaging at Wake Forest University School of Medicine are using the Kinect to control 3D rendered CT scans to give surgeons the ability to manipulate visualizations in midair without using a mouse.
• Increase cardiac surgery rehabilitation adherence: The Esoma Exercise System, created by a staff member at Tufts University, uses the Kinect to help to make cardiac rehabilitation fun and engaging by transforming exercises into a game.

I’m sure there are many other ways the Xbox 360 Kinect is being used in medicine today, whether in testing or in practice. Feel free to share your knowledge with the group by leaving a comment.

One of the health game products I’ve been watching very closely is Zamzee. Not a whole lot has been written about this innovative new company yet, especially when one compares it to previous HopeLab products like Re-Mission. However, they have really geared up for an impressive product, and it will be very interesting to see how well it does in clinical testing and in the market.

What is Zamzee.

Zamzee is an online rewards program for teens based on their recorded physical activity. Users wear a three-axis accelerometer specially calibrated to record short bursts of movement and vigorous activity. Increased movement increases website status which can then be converted into spendable Zamz, a virtual currency used to purchase virtual and tangible rewards.

Zamzee was established in 2010 with an initial investment of $1M from the HopeLab Foundation. The creators of Zamzee hope to make it into a profitable business with the added benefit of getting teens more physically active.

Market potential.

Although Zamzee has some characteristics that make it completely unique, some of its features do remind me of other products, many of which haven’t done so well in the market.

• ME2 Universe – online 3D virtual world which is unlocked by physical activity recorded through a handheld – no longer available
• Zyked – a mobile app which aims to make sports and exercising more fun through gameplay and community features – never made it out of alpha testing
• Pokewalker – pedometer that records steps which are converted to currency for Pokemon Nintendo DS titles – resulted in gamer articles about how to cheat the system to get free currency
• Samurai Pedometer – pedometer and calorie counter in which the more you walk, the further your virtual samurai gets to conquering Japan – popular with adults not children
• Glucoboy – unlock virtual rewards for blood glucose monitoring – picked up by Bayer and marketed as Didget
• GeoPalz – a pedometer for the wrist or shoelace that rewards kids with real and virtual prizes for steps walked – new version launched this year
• WeMuv – a pedometer that rewards physical activity steps with website access and school fundraising opportunities – successful in Canada
• Horsepower Challenge – Humana’s online game that links kid’s real-world activity with a virtual race around the planet – successful in schools

Positions still available.

I have to say that one benefit Zamzee has over probably many of these others is the strong team they’re building. Back in February, Zamzee announced that they finally established a solid executive team including Jonathan Attwood as CEO and Lance Henderson as COO.

However, not all of the available positions have been filled. This is excellent news for all of you job hunters out there as it is very rare for health game positions to be available. Take a look at their careers page to see if you might be a good fit for one of these openings. Good luck out there!

Myomo Inc, a developer of solutions for restoring mobility, recently issued a press release about their newest system for people with stroke and neurological impairments. The Myomo Mobility System, a comprehensive program that helps patients move their arms again, is built upon their product called the mPower 1000. This neuro-robotic arm brace has been clinically proven effective in stroke patients from two days to 21 years post-stroke.

What makes this new system unique is its integration of health games for augmented therapy at home.

The role of health games.

MyGames is a virtual reality-based training system designed to encourage brain injured patients with upper limb motor disorders to practice physical exercises.  It was developed at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland and is a collaboration between the School of Computing and Information Engineering and the School of Health Science.  According to Dr. Michael McNeill of the University of Ulster,

“As a standalone product, myGames allows impaired people to have fun while performing repetitive movements that have been clinically proven to promote motor recovery. Combining Myomo’s neuro-robotics with myGames results in a potentially very effective therapeutic program to increase the ability to perform functional tasks.”

How it works.

The system works by allowing players to interact with both real and virtual objects. Functional tasks and game scenarios are designed to encourage patients’ physical activity in highly motivating, physics-enriched virtual environments. Factors such as gravity can be scaled to adapt to individual patient’s abilities and performance.

The myGames system boasts several benefits for patients including:

• Engages patient more fully in therapy
• Manipulation that satisfies curiosity
• Delivers problem solving activities
• Enables progress independently
• Works systematically toward functional goals

What an amazing and potentially revolutionary way to integrate health games into an existing product. I cannot wait to see what kind of clinical results they get.

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.

One of the tracks during the conference was focused on health gaming which included contributions from pioneer Ben Sawyer, President of Digital Mill and Games for Health conference founder. Pixels and Pills — one of the leading blogs on the pharma industry and digital media, caught up with one of the speakers at the games for health track to get an idea on what exergaming is and how it can be helpful.

Elizabeth Lyons of UNC Chapel Hill explains where exergaming can be helpful in weight maintenance and prevention of weight gain but where it will be necessary to include other initiatives to truly bring about healthy behavior changes:

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The application will be available to the public on September 20, 2010, but as a reader of healthGAMERS, you get the privilege of a sneak peek before it goes live.

How the program works.

1. Sign up for the program through your Facebook account. Each day an email is sent to your inbox encouraging you to do one small action. Examples include using SPF lip balm, eating an apple, or touching your toes. The key here is baby steps…achieving a small personal goal each the day.
2. If you haven’t reported meeting your challenge by 4:00 pm each afternoon, another email is sent to you as a reminder. Basically the program gives you a second chance each day to do the challenge.
3. As you achieve your small goals, you are awarded points. You also get to share your experience (both good and bad) with your friends.

It’s a health game…kinda.

Although MeYou Health readily admits Daily Challenge isn’t a health game in a traditional sense, it uses gaming elements to elicit change.  The ultimate goal of the program is to get the user and their sphere of influence engaged in small health changes on a daily basis. The player is awarded points to track their level of success. Players collect stamps which they can display with pride on their Facebook profile, and there are opportunities to “level up” as goals are achieved. Peer-to-peer competition is also naturally embedded with the ability to view the levels or rankings achieved by other players.

What the program does well.

When I signed up for the program, the first challenge I received was to drink water before I got thirsty.  An unexpected goal to be sure. You mean I don’t have to drink 8 oz or 8 glasses today to meet this goal?  Brilliant! From my perspective, I already feel like a winner. I can totally do that today. In fact let me do that right now…ok, done.  By keeping goals attainable, I feel more likely to stick with the program.

Another aspect of the program I liked was the ability to read goal-achieving advice posted by other users. Should a daily challenge prove difficult for me, I could get tips from other users that already mastered the challenge. It also encouraged me to meet the goal. If they can do it, so can I!  Furthermore, once I achieved my goal, I was given the opportunity to tell others how I personally achieved it too. That gave me a sense of purpose. Perhaps my technique of keeping a water bottle on my desk all day will help others.

Finally, I thought it was interesting that they collected a little baseline data from me before I started the program. It was very simple, questions like “On a 1 to 10 scale, how would you rate your quality of life?”  This might prove to be rather interesting as time goes on. The ability to track progress in a measurable way is something I highly value.

Questions and conclusions.

I do have two questions in relation to Daily Challenge.

I often find that when I receive predictable daily emails in my inbox, such as the Daily Challenge emails would be, I have a tendency to ignore them.  Will this cause habituation in the typical user or will these email reminders really assist in attaining goals?  Both are definitely possibilities.

I also find it annoying when friends clog up my Facebook newsfeed with achievements that I don’t really care about.  Do I really want to know that Joe Blow drank water today when he wasn’t thirsty?  I’m not too sure I do.

All in all, though, I think this little application has some potential for making a big splash. The graphics are great, the goals are attainable, and engagement is almost inevitable in some fashion. They obviously put great thought (perhaps even research?) into keeping behavior change consistent.  Daily Challenge actually offers much more than I had initially anticipated, and I encourage you to try it out when it is available.

About MeYou Health.

MeYou Health helps you improve your well-being by introducing you to small actions you can accomplish every day. They believe that your every day choices can become everyday victories.

MeYou Health is a well-being company dedicated to engaging, educating and empowering people to pursue, achieve and maintain a healthy life. Their products help people effectively engage their social networks for support, while creating fun Web and mobile experiences that encourage people to become mindful of the small actions they can accomplish every day. Located in Boston’s historic South End, MeYou Health was founded in 2009 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Healthways, Inc (Nasdaq: HWAY).

Top Doc combines high-quality medical images of conditions and abnormalities affecting various parts of the body with challenging real-life questions that help medical students, residents and junior faculty improve their visual diagnostic skills. For an online demo, visit topdocgame.com.

“We want users to feel as though they are facing and dealing with relevant scenarios within a virtual medical clinic,” said James Studdiford, MD, FACP, the product’s lead author and Associate Professor at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.

More than 600 fill-in-the-blank style questions are presented for skill levels ranging from novice to expert. Medical students can use Top Doc to prepare for exams; practitioners can use it to sharpen their diagnostic skills.

Navdeep Chehl, a fourth-year medical student at Jefferson Medical College, said the “clear, vivid images and user-friendly format” provided “an effective and enjoyable way to test, refresh and increase” his knowledge.

Meeting a Need

Elsevier has been developing various medical products to meet the growing demand for digital and mobile access.

“As medicine continues to move into the digital space, products like Top Doc will be excellent resources for medical education,” said Randy Charles, Managing Director of Global Clinical Reference. “By offering the program as an iPhone app, Top Doc provides mobile access to medical students and practitioners who value on-the-go learning opportunities and high quality technology capabilities.”

How it Works – and Why

Top Doc users view clinical photographs depicting a physical sign or symptom and try to make the correct diagnosis as quickly as possible. In the game version, the player enters single letters of the alphabet, which fill in spaces to form the correct answer. Three wrong letters result in no credit. But as the student fills in correct letters, the number of remaining characters and the location of these letters serve as clues to prompt memory of the right answer. Questions automatically adjust to the player’s knowledge level.

Players must navigate through multiple levels of difficulty and through all body regions to become the Top Doc. Learning in this way has a scientific basis. Recruiting neural networks to perform pattern completion from partial cues triggers and strengthens memory associations each time the game is played, according to Dr. Patric K. Stanton, Professor of Cell Biology & Anatomy at New York Medical College and an expert in cellular mechanisms of learning and memory. This increases the likelihood of retrieving the appropriate information in future test and diagnostic situations, he said. At the conclusion of each fast-paced game,  players are given a final grade based on their performance, which they can automatically post to their Facebook account. A review mode is also available for those who want to study the content in a  non-competitive flashcard format.

“Users are able to experience and react to realistic patient encounters that require quick, concise clinical responses,” said co-author Amber Tully, MD, Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at Jefferson Medical College.

Top Doc is available for purchase in the iTunes App store and retails for $14.99.

About the author

This article was written by Lisa Haasbroek with the Consumer Marketing / Product Management division of Legacy Interactive. If you wish to know more about Top Doc she can be reached by email: lisa [at] legacyinteractive [dot] com. Thank you so much for providing the information, Lisa!

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.

We’ve always known that they’re excellent forms of relaxation, but of late, video and computer games are being tapped by the medical community as ways to improve general health, treat certain disorders, and even provide therapy and rehabilitation. We’ve seen how doctors are using gaming techniques to help patients who’ve suffered from strokes to recover faster, and we’ve heard of the physical workouts that the Wii Fit and other similar gaming machines provide. There are other areas too where gaming is considered beneficial to health, such as in:

• Treating symptoms of ADHD: Video games, when played for an hour or so a day, help children with ADHD channel their excess energy and achieve a relatively peaceful state of mind by giving them a sense of achievement, a condition that is quite rare in children who have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. While there is no practical (read inexpensive) way to measure the daily returns that gaming provides or see how it helps kids with ADHD, researchers have proved that neurofeedback has positive effects on IQ and attention span, and is also effective as medication.
• Boosting vision: Researchers have found that video games are effective in boosting contrast sensitivity, the ability of the human eyes to distinguish between minute changes in shades of grey against a uniform background. Simply put, contrast sensitivity helps us drive more safely at night and when the external light is poor. This quality decreases with age and was previously thought to be untreatable, except through surgical means. But the Nature Neuroscience study at the University of Rochester has shown that people who play video games that involve aiming and shooting at virtual targets have enhanced contrast sensitivity.
• Improving mental health: We know that video games that involve strategyboost our cognition and memory power, but of late, researchers have found that video games also allow people to beat depression and feel better about themselves. It gives them a sense of achievement as they go from one level to the other and it forms a natural high, the kind associated with exercise and endorphins.

Improving health behaviors and outcomes.

With gaming proving to be a useful health enhancer, it’s no wonder that there are various grants being awarded to study the effect of computerized games on improving health behaviors and outcomes – the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has awarded 12 grants worth $2 million to hospitals and universities, the Princeton Foundation has set up a program called Games for Health as part of its $8.25 million Health Games Research Initiative, the Maine Medical Center in Portland is conducting a study to see if the Dance Dance Revolution dance pad video game can help overweight children lose weight, and the University of Washington School of Medicine is checking to see if mobile games can help people with Type II diabetes improve their eating habits. To put it in a nutshell, the future of health gaming looks bright and healthy.

About the Guest Contributor

This article was contributed by Susan White who regularly writes on the subject of Radiology Technician Schools in Texas. She invites your questions and comments below and at her email address: susan[dot]white33[at]gmail.com.