This last weekend Ben Sawyer from the Games for Health Project went up to Canada to participate in an interesting high-school student game development program run by Algoma University. The program brings in various talents from around the game industry to work with local students to help them explore ideas in game development.

The theme of this weekend was serious games and we chose to inspire them by watching two interesting viral videos put out by heart associations in the U.S. and Britain. You can see those videos here and here. They’re both great and promote hands-only CPR which can save lives.

After showing them the videos we inspired them to work with game development tools and engines to come up with their own games. We’ll show more of this work at our June Games for Health Conference but wanted to show a preview of the “winning” project for the weekend here. It’s a pretty good prototype using the OSU rhythm game engine. Many of the assets were re-skinned by the team who hand-built the beat-map for the song.

We’re hoping the students continue the work and finish off the prototype soon. Given license issues to music and video, we won’t be able to release it but hear’s hoping the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation takes notice of the local student’s work and picks up the project and makes it real.

The program in Canada is called ProtoLaunch and you can find them on Facebook here. Be sure to vote for them as best project here as well.

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The Eighth Annual Games for Health Conference begins on June 12, 2012 at the Hyatt Harborside Hotel in Boston, MA. This year’s event is currently still being planned but registration is now open, and you may still submit talks as well. For complete details visit our 2012 Conference Pages.

What we’re planning on to improve over past events includes the following:

If you’d like to register now for Games for Health you can go directly to registration now.

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Ubisoft sent three people including two of the world famous Frag Dolls to Games for Health to demo Just Dance for our attendees – many of whom joined in…

You can find the official Just Dance website on Facebook here.

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Today we bring you two interviews from our recent Games for Health 2011 Conference.

First up is Paul Tarini from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio talking about their support for the field, and how it’s changed since its earliest days.

That’s followed by Games for Health Co-Founder Ben Sawyer who gives you a sense of why the conference was founded with a particular focus on the exciting pre-conference events on simulation, mobility, and accessibility involved.

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MeYou Health game designer Bill Sabram talks to pulse+signal about the design of their mobile social game for health Monumental at the 7th Annual Games for Health Conference in Boston, May 2011.

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Our Friends at Into Tomorrow with Dave Graveline just posted this great 6 minute package of Games for Health 2011 highlights. Check it out at:

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The Games for Health Conference returns to Boston this May including a third open night reception. The reception will be held at the Hyatt Harborside in Boston, MA from 6:00pm – 9:00pm, Tuesday May 17, 2011.

Boston area health, videogame, and technology related organizations are invited to come network, and find out more about how videogames are helping health & healthcare.

This event features a cash bar, light appetizers, and high energy networking with our conference attendees and other guests.

If you are a game developer with a game demo you’d like to set up during the event (it need not be health oriented) you are welcome to list that in your RSVP for consideration.

Our host hotel, the Boston Hyatt Harborside is providing $12 flat-rate parking for the evening for all attendees.

To attend this event please do one of the following:

1. Reception only attendees should RSVP by 2pm EST, Tuesday, May 17 to rsvp2011@dmill.com with your email and the full names of any companion guests. You must include your organization name, and its sector affiliation (health, technology, or videogames) in the body of your email.

PLEASE NOTE: space is limited and we reserve the right to deny admission. All guest attendees will be given a confirmed invite to attend once their RSVP is accepted.

2. All attendees of the Games for Health Conference will be automatically RSVP’d to the event. If you have not purchased a ticket you may do so by visiting: http://www.gamesforhealth.org/index.php/conferences/gfh-2011/

Location:
Boston Hyatt Harboside Hotel
101 Harborside Drive
Boston, MA 02128
(617) 568-1234

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As part of our efforts to help grow the field of sensor-based health games we’re offering a special opportunity for a free ticket to the Games for Health Conference.

If you are a researcher or student, with a pending or published paper/project in sensor based games, or you are a developer with a published sensor-based game, or are a vendor of biometric sensor devices, and wish to attend Games for Health with a guest ticket please send an email to bsawyer@dmill.com with links to relevant work.

We will select several of the best submissions next week and award a free ticket.

In exchange for this ticket you agree to attend our sensor-based sessions and then share feedback with us the following day about how we and other stakeholders in the space can help expand the effective use of this promising genre of games for health in the future.

Please note: We will evaluate each entry at our discretion and pick from those provided up until there are no more tickets available. No travel, hotel, or other expenses are provided for this event. It is not an opportunity to speak or exhibit.

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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:

http://bit.ly/gfh2011

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.

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Ludica Medica is a pre-conference event featuring 11 unique sessions covering the intersection between games and simulations in support of medical modeling, visualization, training, and learning. The event is held prior to the main Games for Health Conference and is scheduled for Tuesday, May 17 in Boston, MA. If you want to attend Ludica Medica you need to buy a ticket that includes admission on May 17.

Every past Games for Health event has had some level of content concerning medical modeling, simulation, visualization and learning. In recent years we molded some of that content into a track of content. However, we continued to feel there was a better way to address the growing intersection between traditional ideas for in medical simulation and game-based solutions for learning, visualization, and training.

Most importantly, our concern has been that at other medical simulation events the idea of serious games for medical simulation has meant mostly fairly rote 3D exercises that happen to be built in 3D game engines. A bit of score, and a 3D graphics engine are not necessarily the beginning, middle, and end of a game.

With this background The Games for Health Conference has launched Ludica Medica: Improving Medical Modeling, Simulation, Training, and Education with Videogames. Ludica Medica is a combination of medicine and ludic – which is taken from ludus, the latin word for play and is actually the adjective of the word meaning playful.

Unlike our previous content and track Ludica Medica is an attempt to take on a larger role in the growing application of games in the medical modeling, training, and visualization field. While taking on a larger profile, the event is designed to better calibrate what role(s) games can have vs. more normalized forms of simulation, learning, and visualization technologies. Our focus is 100% on efforts that tie back to the field of videogames and the potential comparative advantages those ties can bring including lower costs, ease of use, new forms of learning, and the ability to reach new and larger audiences.

Our final content listing is now available and consists of the following sessions:

The Healing Blade
A game about infectious diseases and therapeutics
Arun Mathews, Francis Kong

The kickoff talk for Ludica Medica is decidedly a game and not a simulation. This current collectible card-game style project is focused on teaching first-year medical students about infectious diseases and their key therapeutics. Originally an offline game, its developers are working to move it online. We’ll hear the story of it, and where it’s headed next.

Safety Training Games and Healthy Behaviors
Eben Myers
Etcetera Edutainment

Etcetera Edutainment has carved out a unique niche with games focused on promoting safe work practices for high risk occupations such as manufacturing and construction. While “Quitting smoking” and “going to the gym” are easily identified as healthy behaviors, behaviors that can be influenced through learning and gameplay. But what about “putting on rubber gloves to do electrical work” or “holding a banister when descending a flight of stairs?” Should these be grouped with more obvious healthy behaviors? And can they be influenced or taught through gameplay? Drawing on examples from Etcetera Edutainment’s safety training games, this talk will attempt to position safety training in relation to health and wellness and will use that as a basis to explore game-based learning and behavior change.

Panel 1: Games vs. Simulations: Is there a Difference & When Does it Matter?

Moderator:

Ben Sawyer, Games for Health Project

Panelists

: Eben Myers, Etcetera Entertainment, Jeffrey Taekman MD, Duke University, Brock Dubbels, University of Minnesota, Harvey Magee, TATRC, Bob Waddington, SimQuest

A key discussion for the entire day take center stage as we debate the specific differences between videogames and simulations. Too often these days, these worlds are casually mashed together in discussion (let alone practice) without much thought given to why each is different from the other. If we’re going to make the most of videogames in the wider simulation, learning, modeling and visualization fields there needs to be a more delineated sense of what makes games unique and what they add to simulation that isn’t part of simulation to begin with.

Evolving Our Use of Applicable Game Worlds for Medical Training: A Case Study
Jeff Taekman & Michael Steele (Duke University Medical School)

This talk covers a recent RFP Duke University Medical School put out concerning their next game-based medical training project. Drawing on what they’ve learned so far about the opportunity for game technologies, simulation, and game design to help build better medical learning platforms, the team will report how they’re evolving their use of these tools & techniques offering insight on where others might head as well.

Games, Sims, and Advanced Technology: Where the Armed Forces Simulation Institute for Medicine is going.
Presented by TATRC.
Harvey Magee, TATRC

TATRC, a Games for Health Conference funding supporter, will provide an update on their game related work to date, and offer more background on where things will be heading in the years ahead.

Lessons Learned: The review, planning & production of a digital training tool for long-term care certified nursing assistants.
Brock Dubbels
University of Minnesota

This talk will review the planning and production of a digital training tool for certified nursing assistants who work in long term care facilities. This talk will encompass the creation of construct validity for in-game performance metrics that translate to professional development and cost benefit analysis.

Best Practices for Role Playing Soft Skills in Virtual Worlds
Patti Abshier & Michelle Hyland
Cicatelli Associates Inc.

Soft skills training in medical contexts is a big need and the opportunity to reduce costs, smooth logistics, and improve outcomes by using virtual world and game systems is great. That doesn’t mean you can just throw users into a simple space and watch the magic. Cicatelli Associates has been honing a design and process for role-playing soft skills in virtual worlds like Second Life. During this talk they will discuss everything they’ve learned and developed into a set of best practices for role-playing led training in online environments.

Panel II : Now, Near, Next: The Real State of Health Training Simulations, Worlds, and Games
Moderator: Bruce Miligan, Trainingport Strategies
Panelists: To Be Announced

The emerging use of games and game technologies in support of medical training is still young. Lots of work is left to do, but thankfully there are also early lessons learned from pioneering efforts. This sessions combines a few of those pioneers together to shoot a few arrows forward into the future instead of just pulling them out from their backs.

Applying Contempoary Theory for Game-Learning to Medical Education
Eric Bauman
University of Wisconsin

The modern healthcare environment is saturated with technology that connects clinicians, and patients through complex multimedia portals. Today’s students are by definition digital natives, while many of their teachers and mentors are digital immigrants. Students have grown up with a degree of media literacy and interaction simply not available to many faculty, instructional staff, and researchers who finished their “formal training” just a “few” years ago. Institutions that fail to attain expertise in media literacy and address the social context in which contemporary learning takes place will fail to meet to meet student expectations and will no longer be able to attract the best and brightest students.

While many traditional educational theories still provide a basis for clinical education, many if not all of them predate the modern digital revolution. Basing curricula on theories that do not attend to the current educational, clinical, and social landscape fails to prepare today’s students for future practice.

Preparing today’s students for careers in healthcare requires a pedagogical paradigm shift. The
This discussion will review the theoretical underpinnings that provide scaffolding for contemporary theories specifically envisioned for game-based learning taking place in virtual environments.

Better Outcomes Though Varied & Adaptive Training for Games & Simulations
Jamie Pina
RTI International

Not all of the games produced through the serious games initiative meet the adaptive assessment demands of simulation-based training. Simulation-based training aims to provide students with real-world capabilities acquired and practiced in a simulated environment. However, real-world working conditions may be ill-structured and unpredictable; students must be prepared to adapt their skills to a changing environment, and a training environment must be able to employ adaptive performance metrics. One approach to developing this adaptive capability in students is to situate them into multiple simulated contexts, with different tasks to perform under various conditions to specified standards, and with the aggregate of training situations adequately covering the space of real-world situations. This presentation will describe game design templating for developing sufficiently varying simulated tasks to ensure that the simulated training environment meets real-world adaptive needs.

Pivotal Decision & Blast : Game-Based Training Projects for Emergency Response
Randy Brown
Virtual Heroes/ARA

Two interesting demos for emergency response will be provided. The first, Pivotal Decision focuses on the emergency response aftermath from a hurricane event. Blast, focuses on emergency response to a IED or related explosion and the triage work that ensues after such an event.

Closing Group Feedback & Follow Up Actions
Bruce Milligan & Ben Sawyer

As the day closes we will provide time to foster two conversations to help set the stage for an even better event in 2012. First, will be to review the major lessons learned from the day, and to revisit the general question overhanging the conference, “what is the unique role for videogames in the wider world of medical modeling, simulation, and visualization?”. Second, will be to discuss how the community in attendance can work together to drive forward useful outcomes from this first meeting.

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