Using Games to Improve Medicine

miller60 writes "At GameJournalism.com we look at Games for Health 2004, a conference which will explore the use of interactive games in treating patients and training doctors. One presentation discusses "Glucoboy," a Gameboy based diabetes monitoring solution, while another looks at the use of video games in improving surgical outcomes. The event is organized by the Serious Games Initiative, among others."

Re:Sad...

[bersl2]

I disagree.

Isn't it wonderful how video games combined with biofeedback can be used to heal?

As a juvenile/type 1 diabetic

[Anonymous Coward]

Who was diagnosed during the time they came out with Captain Novolin [seanbaby.com] all I can say is thanks, but no thanks. Everytime I went to the doctor, it was "Hey, play this fun game!" when what I wanted to do was actually, gasp, discuss the disease and figure out the best ways of dealing with it. I was probably atypical, but the fact remains that many kids will be forced to sit through these horrible games when they could be doing something productive.

Re:while it's not exactly medical...

[Rallion]

Ender's Game is far better.

A book, but soon to be a movie.

Nothing New

[EightBits]

This is nothing new. We have seen games used in this way for other fields. For instance, training soldiers and teaching kids (anyone remember Math Fun on the Intellivision?)

While it's great to see new fields opening up to the idea of game-based training, I wonder just how effective it could be. It's easy to see how video game training could benefit soldiers, affecting things like awareness, when and how to hide, move, shoot, etc... It's also a no-brainer to see how it can be used to teach children. But, when we're looking at doctors, it starts to get a little blurry to me how this can help. It just seems to me that a game that would be capable of teaching a medical doctor would have to be so complex that it just wouldn't be a fun game. If you simplify it too much, the doctors would start to overlook certain possibilities in treatments because the simulators never covered it. That could be a bad thing.

Then again, maybe I'm biased by the fact that I grew up playing games that taught children and yet have never seen one for teaching doctors or professions of that caliber/genre. I hope my skepticism is proven wrong because if it's possible, I think game-based training is a great way to train. If it can keep you interested and at the same time teach you, then it's a good thing all around.

So, are they going to be putting gameboy versions of "Operation" in ERs now?

Re:Sad...

[echeslack]

I think this could be a great thing, but it will be hard to get it right. For instance, it would be nearly impossible to use a game as a way to help something long term because after awhile most people will become disinterested in the game. They may continue to do it, but it wouldn't have the same appeal.

I hope you all enjoy your little laugh at diabetes

[Anonymous Coward]

And I hope you never get it. Yeah, it doesn't kill you right away, it just lowers your standard of living the rest of your shortened lifespan. Then you add the fact that there may already be a cure for Type 1 diabetes [harvard.edu] that may take year reach anyone because of the billions of dollars being made from the disease and it's just a ton of laughs. Ha ha.

VR for pain and phobia

[rmadhuram]

In a related note, Virtual Reality is already being used to treat various phobias.
http://www.vrphobia.com/ [vrphobia.com]
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9905/21/t_t/pain .managment/ [cnn.com]

Re:productive

[ro_coyote]

Unfortunately, there is a very, very thick line inbetween the realms of computer programming/game design and true medicine. Good game or bad, one can only contribute what they're capable of giving. I for one, as much as I'd love to help find a real cure for specific diseases, know absolutely nothing about medicine. The best I can do is create something that would try to help comfort a patient's stay in that hosipital.

Come back Konami

[EmperorKagato]

Another Great Example that shows Konami needs to continue the Dance Dance Revolution Franchise for the States. I'm sure if they can found a large enough addressable market in the states will they may consider to continue DDR(in the arcades) or build more interactive games like Mocap Boxing. At least before the PIU Series takes over.

Re:Diabetes Game

[yo303]

It doesn't say it's a game, it says it's a "Gameboy based diabetes monitoring solution".

It sounds like a portable blood sugar monitor system based on the Gameboy, a cheap and readily available hardware platform.

You could have graphs and stuff.

yo.

It's just that we're stuck in the wrong definition

[Moraelin]

At some point people figured that photos can be used for more than the faces of your loved ones. Or that the printing press can be used for more than novels and bibles. Or that films don't have to involve car chases: they can just as well be used to teach.

However in the case of "games" we're somehow still stuck with the wrong definition. Everything that involves any kind of simulation _has_ to be called a game, and/or has to be designed as a game.

We're told for example that the 9/11 terrorists used MS's Flight Simulator "game" to train. Well guess what? By the definition in any other medium, it's not a game. It's a very complex and realistic airplane simulation, that only incidentally also happens to have any entertainment value. It _is_ all about training to fly an airplane to start with.

If it was a film, it would have been called training material. But since it happens on the computer, it's called a "game".

E.g., we're told that the US army uses "games" to train its soldiers. No, they don't. They use some complex tactical or vehicle simulators, which only incidentally could also be viewed as a "game". I doubt that the purpose is simply to spend an entertaining evening collecting points and powerups and talking smack to other platoons. It's training, not a "game".

E.g., conversely, as Will Wright noticed when he was designing The Sims, most people who bought some serious software tools like 3D home or garden designers were actually using them as a sort of a game.

So basically I'd say that we're stuck with a wrong definition dating from back when games meant pacman eating pills on a simplistic 2D maze. It was entertaining, no doubt, but hardly representative of the direction "games" take today. There were no realistic skills or lessons to be learned from PacMan. It was just entertainment.

Today we have more and more complex simulations, which incidentally are also entertaining. A lot of times the entertainment value is _because_ of their being a better learning tool, and allowing you to experiment things which would be impractical or impossible to try IRL. No, I don't mean rocket jumps, I mean for example piloting a jumbo jet.

Or to put it otherwise, it's sorta like some people go driving around on weekends just because they like driving. Yet noone would file cars under "toys". They're a serious tool which, incidentally, can also be used for entertainment by some people.

What about a game that acutally helps research?

[brent_linux]

What if it were possible to make a game where you solving a puzzle actually helped to further along a research project. Something like distributed folding at home, but something that can't just be done iteration after iteration. Something that takes pattern recognition or something. There are a lot of puzzle game players that are off the charts when it comes to finding patterns in seeming chaos. It would be cool to harness some of this wasted energy.

Core Weakness of SImualtions and Games

[G4from128k]

Simulation games, such as these medical games, share a core weakness in the design process. For example, in designing a 3-D tracking device, I simulating the sensor data and the wrote the algorithms for interpreting that data. It worked perfectly in simulation, but did not work when we made the actual device.

The problem was that I had made a minor sign error in some 3-D coordinate transformations. Because I designed both the simulation of the sensor and the software that processed that sensor data, I put the same mistake in both places. This sign error was self-consistent in silico, even as it was wrong in reality (or in vitro, as the medical researchers would say). Simulations can create false confidence.

By the same token, if the designers of the game have the same medical expert both create the simulated patient and the scoring of player's actions, then any errors in that expert's knowledge may create a false reality -- a simulation that is self-consistent but inaccurate. Doctors that are trained on the system may be to self-confident because they think they have seen a 1,000 simulated causes of X and think they know how such cases seem to progress/respond to treatment. But if this deep experience is based on erroneous "physics" then the learning is erroneous.

I'm not saying that simulation games are bad, simulations can help train doctors to recognize and respond to rare events (analogous to flight simulators that train pilots for an engine fire that they are unlikely to ever personally experience).

My point is that simulation games have a weakness in creating cognitive experiences that seem very real and very plausible, yet can be very wrong. Medical knowledge is, to date, too uncertain and too dynamic. If they do use simulations to train doctors and then discover an error in the simulation, they would need to recall both the simulation software and all the doctors trained on it.