Wednesday May 18, 2011
Enabling A Personal Health Entertainment Ecosystem
Up until recently, the use of specialized biometric and location oriented sensors as inputs to gameplay has been limited. A steady stream of recent product launches and research represents the beginning of what we believe will be one of the next big things in the games for health field — games powered by biometric and environmental sensor data. To help explore the sensor-based game opportunity we’ve worked with partners in the space to develop a “Games for Health Sensor Day: Enabling A Personal Health Entertainment Ecosystem”.
Combining existing sessions from our Open Track with several new unique sessions dedicated to sensors, Games for Health now features a day for developers, researchers, and sensor manufacturers to get together and discuss the intricacies of bringing about widespread sensor-based games that are also health specific, with biometric tracking, and strong PHR compatibility.
To attend Games for Health Sensor Day events you must attend the core Games for Health Conference on May 18.To register & purchase a ticket to Games for Health please visit:
The day will be comprised of the following sessions:
Playing with Physiological Measures
11:00am – 11:45am
Didier Combatalade
Thought Technology
This presentation gives an overview of the physiological measures commonly used in biofeedback and demonstrates how physiological measures can be used to enrich the video game experience. Three broad categories of applications will be discussed: games for health, games for fun and human computer interfaces.
The physiological sensors that will be presented include skin conductance, temperature, respiration, heart rate, muscle contraction and brainwave. Each sensor type will be discussed in terms of detection methods, signal quality and susceptibility to noise.
The physiological signals will also be discussed in terms of possible use in human/computer interface applications, including games for fun, where the physiology is a tool for controlling the game and games for health, where the game translates tedious physiological exercises (such as breathing deeply) into more engaging activities.
Games, Sensors & PHRs : Gameplay Meets Measurement
12:00pm – 12:30pm
Brigitte Piniewski, MD. , Chief Medical Officer, PeaceHealth Laboratories, Oregon.
One of the major low-hanging fruits for games with sensors in the health space is to become highly integrated with the various efforts surrounding personal health records.
Institutional data (clinic and hospital data) accumulates when individuals enter care deliver systems. Typically this is too late in the individual’s health journey to enable robust reversibility of preventable adverse health outcomes. Pre-institutional data, sometimes referred to as lifestyle or health journey exhaust can be easily captured and organized to provide high definition living and enable significant prevention of preventable poor health outcomes.
Gameplay Meets Measurement is a session that seeks to build a current picture about the opportunities afforded to ideas around quantified self, patient monitoring, adherence, and compliance when it biometric sensors become commonplace for health & entertainment purposes. This session, will lay the landscape of modern health journeys and highlight the high yield data elements that can easily be captured via light instrumentation of crowds. The role of gaming will move from a current view of “fun, trivial, hardly life-saving” to “the essential back bone of enabling crowdsourced strategic health intelligence in a timely manner”.
Topical Lunch w/Continua
12:30pm – 1:45pm
Chuck Parker, Executive Director, Continua Health Alliance
Join Chuck Parker, Executive Director of the Continua Health Alliance during lunch for a Q&A discussion. The Continua Health Alliance is comprised of 230+ member companies working together to develop and design guidelines that will enable vendors to build interoperable sensors, home networks, telehealth platforms, and health and wellness services. Such systems could integrate with games to create powerful new healthy behavior change platforms.
PHRs and Games : Back to the Drawing Board
1:45pm – 2:45 pm
Ben Sawyer, President, Digitalmill
Someday personal health records and games will merge. This has been a staple notion of the Games for Health Project nearly since its inception. Each year for the past four years The Games for Health Conference becomes a moment to further discuss the possible interactions, features, and potential outcomes when videogames and PHRs begin merging.
PHRs and Games : Back to the Drawing Board is the latest session in The Conference’s effort to push forward thought leaders on how PHRs and games will operate together. This group exercise session invites you to review the various pieces of thought leadership from past conference efforts and others. After receiving an initial briefing attendees will break into groups and begin developing their own unique ideas for PHRs that interact with games, look like games, receive or send data to and from games, or some other incredible idea.
As each group finishes documenting their idea a short presentation will be made and then all the final mock-up plans will be translated into digital form to share on the Games for Health web site.
Attendees to this session will benefit from learning more about the potential for games to enhance and be enhanced by merging together effectively with emerging PHR platforms. Furthermore, attendees will gain a chance to think forward to a time when the games for health field is not comprised of disconnected stand-alone game experiences and are legitimately and fully integrated with connected health systems.
The Pervasive Sensor World : Obstacles & Opportunities
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Ed Siemens, Director, Marketing, A&D Medical
Mike Paradis, Global Sales Manager, ANT Wireless
As author William Gibson once said “The future is here it just isn’t evenly distributed”. Sensor systems for monitoring any number of biometric and environmental measurements have existed for some time, and continue to get smaller, better, and eventually more pervasive. However, as pervasive as things seem, there is still a bit of work left before the world is awash in sensors, and the necessary systems and value chains to get to the evenly distributed moment Gibson’s comment makes light of.
This session brings together veterans of the sensor hardware world to discuss where things stand today, what obstacles remain to be tackled. The talk focuses on where the opportunities lie in both moving toward a pervasive sensor world, and once we’re there. Covering hardware design, protocols, data-streams and backend requirements, the session aims to help attendees have a better sense of the fundamental issues shaping the software and game-specific opportunities that comprise the games with sensors opportunity.
Games with Sensors : From Experiments to Ubiquitous Health Gaming
4:40pm – 5:30pm
Jim Burns, Software Architect
Elbrys Networks
As part of any effort to build a larger set of tools and services to support sensor-based games Elbrys Networks delved into available research, information, and prior art concerning the creation of games that used biometric, location, and environmental sensors to create new forms of gameplay and gameplay input. Working with this information Elbrys began a needs analysis to determine what would be needed to turn the world of sensor based gaming from a field of unique, stove-piped one-off efforts to a robust field of activity.
This session presents the findings of this work, combines it with insight gained from working to stitch together a ubiquitous sensor-game toolkit, and specifically discusses the hurdles and requirements that arise when sensor-based games combine the high-end user experiences of entertainment with the high-end regulatory environment of healthcare.
Business Models for Games for Sensors
5:40pm – 6:15pm
Anthony Delli Colli, VP, Marketing
Elbrys Networks
Continua Health Alliance
Vice-Chair, Market Adoption Working Group
After a day of discussing game designs, health records, HIPPA frameworks, wireless standards, entertainment psychology and more, it’s just about time to get to business. The closing conversation for Games for Health Sensor Day will focus on business models for sensor-based games. No dominant model exists, and like the wider games for health field it’s likely going to be an amalgamation of various models from consumer driven wellness, to entertainment motives, compliance economics, and more.
This session attempts to identify the various proposed and actual emerging models in the sensor based gaming sector. Each model will be described and assessed from both a probability of success standpoint, and from the environment needed to support its greatest potential success. Attendees will get the chance to comment on various models, and propose their own. The goal, will be to build shared ideas about what models may prove to be the most effective collectively for the stakeholders working to make games with sensors become a powerful part of future health platforms and entertainment.
