Games for Health

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Serious gaming is serious business, and the region of Utrecht is to be a future leader in the domain. Serious games can enhance eHealth, mHealth, and telehealth and promise to tackle challenges in 21st-century health care. The Games for Health conference is dedicated to that expectation. 

VIRTUAL REALITY THERAPY

Founded in 2004, the Games for Health Project supports community, knowledge and business development efforts to use cutting-edge games and game technologies to improve health and health care.

To date, the project has brought together researchers, medical professionals, and game developers to share information about the impact games and game technologies can have on health, health care and policy. A major effort of the Games for Health Project is the annual Games for Health Conference in Boston. Topics include exergaming, physical therapy, disease management, health behavior change, biofeedback, rehab, epidemiology, training, cognitive health, nutrition, and health education. Building on the successful editions in Boston, Games for Health reached Europe in 2011.

The non-profit Games for Health Europe is the official sister conference of the Games for Health project. Together with the US organisation, it aims to bring serious gaming and health care together in order to contribute to more advanced healthcare across Europe. This was the third edition of Games for Health Conference in Amsterdam. It was supported by KPMG and organized superbly: keynotes, presentations, live demos, games, tutorials, dev camps, and much more.

Probably the most impressive presentation (keynote) was real-time telesurgery with Google Glass. The presenter and the surgeon were in direct contact, and broadcasted to the audience. It was impressive to see the wearable device in action and consider the possibilities of augmented reality in health care.

REAL-TIME SURGERY VIA GOOGLE GLASS

On June 14th, 2012, a declaration from the European Parliament called for a week of cardiac arrest awareness, to be held throughout Europe. The Italian Resuscitation Council (IRC) has answered this call and planned a series of structured projects to best organize the week of awareness in Italy (October 14th-20th 2013), the so-called “Viva!” week (http://www.viva2013.it). Viva is an Italian word meaning both “alive” and “long life for”. In May 2013, they released a serious game directed at young people. The game have different interacting scenarios, i.e. school, home, stadium; during the development of the story, the player find himself in the need to perform a high quality chest compression to save another character from cardiac arrest and being able to pass to the next level. The game is directed to lay people with the intent to improve cardiac arrest and CPR awareness and ultimately survival from cardiac arrest. The game won an award of 200.000 Euros which will be put into the development of the Sci-Fi edutainment game called Relive.

Rotterdam Global Health Initiative is a newly established group at iBMG with a mission to advance the health of people, fight against poverty and socio-economic health inequalities, and contribute to good governance in health. RGHI is a coalition for serious games & innovative learning in global health, in the Rotterdam area. It collaborates with five companies (ITpreneurs, RANJ, Organiq, Lucidious and VertigoGames) in order to create made-to-measure games for training, teaching and policy purposes, evidence-based game design, and integrated pedagogical strategies. It is focused on structural improvements by the means of research, education, and serious gaming.

At the conference, a new initiative of the Utrecht government and some 15 companies, organizations, academia (plus the Dutch Army) was established. The idea is to create a hub for serious games development. There will be funds available, plus support for establishing companies. The representative of what is yet to come is the Dutch Game Garden.

Interesting was also Videum, a health video social network, NHS Choices Health Apps Library, GE’s #GetFit - a game to help you make small changes in your everyday life that can improve your health and reduce the likelihood of certain cancers by sharing your healthy choices daily via social media.

Games for Health was a truly memorable conference. As with any innovation, it is the product of a meaningful combination of two (or more) previously detached domains. Gaming can help with improvement of health-related outcomes, for elderly and re-convalescents first, educate the population, engage and help with medical adherence, and much, much more. I will be looking for the next big thing to happen exactly at the crossroads of these two domains. Health care is ripe for disruption and serious gaming is just "the right tool" to do it.