Games For Health

Design the ultimate pandemic and wipe out all life on Earth in this dark (but satisfying) iOS strategy title.

This could have interesting applications in both medical education and the mapping of disease.

FMicrosoft Kinect–based medical software startup Jintronix has won the $50,000 top prize at Montreal’s International Startup Festival.
Jintronix, a finalist for Microsoft’s TechStars-based Kinect Accelerator, creates Windows-based games that aim to make physical therapy and rehabilitation fun and afforable. The games utilize Microsoft’s Kinect motion-tracking hardware, and we handily talked to the company before their big win.

A recent article in the FastCo.Design blog highlights the T-Haler, a training inhaler prototype that, according to the creators can increase proper inhaler use three-fold in just three minutes of training.

That may not sound like a huge deal. Even someone who isn’t asthmatic and has never used an inhaler can probably visualize the process: shake, press down and take a big-gulp inhale. Easy enough? Not quite. Apparently, nearly 75% of patients use their inhalers improperly–an error that can lead to hospitalization, even death.

Who says that Fruit Ninja is just a simple game that has no way to benefit society on hold apart from reducing their efficiency at work because highly addictive casual games have this strange manner of having you come back time and again? It seems that Fruit Ninja for the iPad is also capable of assisting stroke patients in their rehabilitation, as neuroscientists in Australia have discovered.

Video games can be used to educate through repetition and feedback, but they can also have some less-than-positive side effects. Learn about how video games can improve the educational experience as well as hinder it.

What’s the key to unlocking human potential? Tony Stubblebine, a first-hand witness to the coming-of-age moments of some of today’s most successful entrepreneurs, has always sought an answer to that very question. Now Stubblebine seeks to answer that question for everyone, through Lift, his one-year-old, four-person startup centered around goal-tracking.

For a few years now, there has been great deal of interest in using videogame technology to improve health and education. So far, there haven’t been any blockbusters in this space outside of “exergaming” titles like Wii Fit. I attended the Games for Change Festival in New York last month, and what I saw there gave me reason to believe that there will be some big hits for education and health videogames in the near future.

Boehringer data competition produces academic-standard models in just three months - Kaggle partnership used gamification approach to encourage work on predictive models.

en Sawyer is the co-founder of game-consulting firm Digitalmill and one of the pioneers in the field of Games for Health. He founded the Serious Games Initiative a decade ago as part of a U.S. government research effort into how games can accomplish useful ends beyond fun. In 2004, he also co-founded the Games for Health project, which seeks to use games to improve the state of health. The Games for Health project receives major funding from the Pioneer Portfolio of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.