Slashdot Mirror
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."
Is Doom III, which will aid the recovery of stool samples from patients.
Bored? Visit my exciting counter page!
i'd hate to be the patient whos doctor looses that game
Isn't it saddening how dependant we have all become on getting our video game fix?
Sniperdermic Needles
Sprint/bunnyhop to long and your sugar goes low
Camp and your sugar goes high
Different health modules, some high in sugar... best be careful
Sugar fluctuates too much and you temporarily blind
Okay, who's up for writing a mod for HL?
They are great for inducing vomiting by certain people like me. Urp.. get me away from this thing!
I believe Daikatana was used for a while as a blood pressure monitor, but it had disastrous results.
A game about diabetes monitoring? It's been done, and they shouldn't do it again any time soon.
This whole game/medicine/mind thing was covered admirably by Norman Spinrad back in 1966, with his short story "Carcinoma Angels."
c s_ archive/spinrad/spinrad1.html
http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classi
Some games listed as related to health research:
Psychological Interaction Alter Ego (Activision by Dr. Peter Favaro) Two versions Female and Male were released. Mind Mirror (EA by Timothy Leary)
The new version is a PC game, the old classic I know and love comes on a little square of paper....
wow all the cool new games that will come out...first person doctor, real time surgery(RTS) etc where you can do your own operation and see how many times and in how many ways you can die before the actual surgery. will give evryone a realistic expectation from the actual surgery.
Anyone remember The Last Starfighter where the protagonist plays a game and ends up saving the galaxy? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/
"Greetings, starfighter! You have been recruited by the star league to defend the frontier against Xur and the Kodan armada!"
I am quite certain -- the last thing I need is an excuse to play more videogames. They need to attach this glucose meter to a friggin stairmaster.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
How about the Cancer Game? It is Cancerific! Seriously though, games are becomming more integrated into many different areas people have not previously associated with video games. There has been a TON of stories recently about games being used for education and such. Is it really surprising though? Games are just a relatively new media afterall. From written text, to pictures, to movies every medium has found uses in a wide range of fields. Games are such a new medium they have not proliferated very far yet, but I don't find this idea any more surprising then movies being used.
--- "End Of Line" - MCP
Who was diagnosed during the time they came out with Captain Novolin 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.
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?
There are many skinny type 1 diabetics, including several Olympic athletes.
Diabetic kid: "MOM! If I don't keep playing, I'll die!"
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
Remember it? Hell, I bought it on DVD! That movie rocks! I think just about any kid would love to play that role (in real life of course!)
I bought it about a week ago and I hadn't seen it for over a decade before that. It's amazing to see that movie today and see just how good those graphics were! Holy cow! They're damn good even by today's standards!
I saw that within the last year or so, Tron 2.0 came out. I would love to see a modern game version of The Last Starfighter. Think about it. Multiplayer mode would rock! When I pick up the Death Blossom upgrade and you better just run, bitch!
You could administer treatment to yourself from portable health vending machines
fifteen jugglers, five believers
"Operation" taught me how to remove a funny-bone years ago.
Now I help moderate Slashdot.
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 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.
Everquest: good practice for those 36 hour shifts during residency.
John Hancock wuz here.
... you have unlocked:
InsulinRage!
Similar to Mario recovering a star token, InsulinRage causes the player to flash bright light for thirty seconds as they become impervious to attack. Unlike Mario however, at the conclusion of these thirty seconds, the GlucoBoy player enters HypoglycemicShock.
First, it was Beer found to be as healthy as wine, and now games being used to improve medicine. Now the geeks will be known for our healthy ways!
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
This is nothing new. Medical schools have been training tomorrows physicians with the game "Operation" for years now. How else would students learn to remove butterflies from the stomach? By practicing on live subjects? That would be unconcienable.
To those who played "Life & Death I or II" surgery simulation. That was always fun, but somehow I have always kiled my patient after first incision :(
Yeah, but scars are sexy.
The link is facinating research, looks like they may have nailed T1 diabetes and possibly many other autoimmune diseases.
By accident as usual.
I just wanted to point out this guy as a great example of using video games (in this game virtual reality) for more than just entertainment. He created "Spider world" to help people with aracnaphobia get used to spiders, and then later created "Snow world" to help burn victims during painful procedures.
I wrote a big 26-page paper on the guy a year ago in my english class after he gave a lecture at my school. Seemed like a very interesting guy.
-Bill
It's not just some dumb educational game, though. It's a dumb educational game which requires you to take a blood sample every once in a while. ;)
Don't forget "Captain Novolin" for Super Nintendo. The game that makes learning about Diabetes fun! You are Captain Novolin, a superhero with no special abilities or tools to speak of, charged with the task of rescuing the diabetic mayor from a race of sugar-coated aliens. No I am not joking. It is real. Click here.
Google confirms it too (for the lazy)
I am a theoretical physicist; for me physics is the prototype of all sciences. When I hear the word 'science' I think pf physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology, etc, even economy or computer science, never of medicine.
A few weeks ago I was shocked to hear on TV someone saying that he became a physician because he loved science. My reaction was 'If you loved science, why did you study medicine, instead of a science (biology, geology, physics, whatever)
For me a science is a branch of human knowledge which has the purpose of understanding how the world works AND USES THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD for achieving this purpose. The scientific method consists in making experiments and observations and in building theories which explain observed facts, leading to new experiments and observations which lead to new theories, etc.
The purpose of medicine is healing people, NOT UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD, and thus it is not a science. For a physician is irrelevant how a healing method works, the only thing that matters is that it works (and does not cause secondary damage). Lots of drugs have been used for centuries whitout knowing how they work. In this respect medicine is closer to religion or witchraft than science. It seems that medicine is some kind of engineering. Now and then physicians and engineers use scientific data for their jobs; however it is irrelevant whether some medical or engineering techniques have a scientific basis or not.
Although very important for understanding the world, mathematics is not a science because 1) it studies abstract notions and relations, not the world 2) it does not use the scientific method (no experiments or observations in mathematics, only theories).
The required complexity of a "game" to train doctors would tend to make it not fun. I think the same could also be said for games designed to guide many other professionals.
At some point the task that a "game" like this is trying to accomplish makes it no longer a game because it is not really entertaining. It is instead a simulation that the person is using to practice their trade. At that point, calling it a "game" seems like more of a marketing move than anything else.
Of course if you really like what you do, it may still be entertaining for you to practice. For instance, I imagine a military flight combat simulator could be pretty fun, but I still wouldn't call it a game (unless perhaps when you killed an enemy it blew up like Han Solo's final tie kill).
Better yet, if you want a physical game to help rehabilitate type 2s, try Konami's Dance Dance Revolution on the PS1 or PS2, or the free PC version.
. . . because all those games about teaching typing made me an effective killing machine. My fast fingers make pulling the trigger second nature. All those math games made it easier for me to keep track of ammo (if I shoot on full auto for 3 seconds, how many bullets will I use?) and those damn pattern matching games make my enemy's camouflage obvious to my eyes. I'm ready. Send me in to kill bad guys. I'm a fat, lazy, mouse wielding killing machine!
If only the Alpha-Betas had known about this, they would have just left those nerds alone.
I'm not a chick. I am a dude. I am not a homosexual. I am straight. But I still think scars are sexy, and yes, I mean on a chick! I like my chicks sweet but mean!
Just put a Nintendo 64 with "Hey You, Pikachu!" in each and every room and I'm sure patients will just be shooting out of their beds left and right in much better health. Cost effective, too! =)
In a related note, Virtual Reality is already being used to treat various phobias.n .managment/
http://www.vrphobia.com/
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9905/21/t_t/pai
imagine if the hours that went into making the game had gone into looking for a cure....
Like the saying goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -Pyrotic
Person walking on the street
Person get hit by car
Person grieviously hurt
Person uses a small medikit with a red cross on it
*BING!* Back to life!
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
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.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
I recently heard of burns patients being treated using a game which was described as "total immersion" - some sort of goggle vision. But the neat part was the game it imvolved - chasing snowmen about a snow covered landscape.
Apparently it's pretty helpful - I mean who can feel burnt chasing snowmen?
"Cats like plain crisps"
"Ben's Game" just came across my desk, and as it's relevent, I tought I'd mention it here.
Ben is a 9-year old boy who had lukemia (now in remission) who had a wish: to create a videogame where he could fight his cancer.
Make-a-Wish foundation stepped up to the plate, and got some developers from LucasArts to make such a game.
The game is a free download. Apparently the USCF Children's Hospital is installing copies of the game in its pediatric ward for the children there to play. The game is quite well done. I can just imagine the health benifits for the child sitting the hospital on chemo yelling "Take that cancer!".
As HomeStar Runner would say, this kid has the heart of a champion. Way to go Ben!
Yaz.
The game you quote tried to inform children about diabetes. It would have been the same about drugs, HIV, whatever...
...
:)
You can't really have fun with serious subjects...
The real game about diabete would have been to master syringe, precision shot, difficult fillings, perfect timings, etc.
We don't need games to educate, for that, the school system exists...
We need games to have fun, and if the fun help you to improve you reflex, your memory, your capacity to recognize things, then it is great...
And just think at all the thing you learn playing Civ
I think we need ot pull and inerspace type thing, where we can inject a remote control meaneature vesel that can relay video signals of what it sees and has simple lasers or simply hot electrodes. I think this could easily be made into a fun and amusing way to fight diseases and to internal surgery by simply have a person swallow a pill and then the Dr can play some FPS inside you body. Perhaps different visual reference coudl be created so when you are doing some micro seuters it can be represented by your repairing a hole in the side fo a space station or something.
Looks promising. They need to be really careful, though....drugs that inhibit or kill immune cells can very a little unpredicable. I wish they had gone into more detail as to how they are keeping new WBCs from being formed with the same defect that causes them to attack the islet cells.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
Back in 1988, there was a game called 'Life & Death' where you got to do general surgeries like removing an appendix.
Then in 1990, it was brain surgery in 'Life & Death 2: The Brain'.
Notice, you can download both games from the sites above. I must say, they got pretty high scores back in the day.
Why would you call a medical training/monitoring program a game?
Sindri Traustason.
it's a little ot but we could put games to better use...
/.ers and some cyborgs (they could produce models that look like the governator, richard nixon, al franken...)
who wouldn't want to play soldier of fortune and kill real terrorists at the same time
all we need are a bunch of devoted
i don't know but we already have unmanned predator drones so this can't be too far off...
All the torrents you could want.
People involved in clinical research do all the normal "sciencey" things -- perform experiments, write papers for peer reviewed journals, and -- *yes* -- they do care why methods work. Yes, it's applied research, but physicists who are trying to design and build fusion reactors are still scientists too, no?
Practicing physicians on the other hand, while they may keep in touch with current research (perhaps skimming the New England Journal of Medicine or Lancet) aren't scientists in any real sense of the term, although they certainly use science in their work. It's a bit like the difference between a chemist and a chemical engineer.
A real FPS player ain't taking shit from anyone.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I think the point is not "play to learn" but "learn as you play".
Sim evolution or sim body. Imagine a population of the Sims, crossed with civilization. Your population has fitness levels, genetic traits, percent of the population over 60, etc. testostrone levels, etc.
Over time, they would evolve based on nutrition and conditions.
It would have to be oversimplified a bit, of course.
Boring? Perhaps. But it's the most interesting way I can think of to present some really complex and obscure topics.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Looks like you took a wrong turn at Albequerque.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Yeah because we all know that if you find something funny you automatically agree with it or think it is a good thing.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
...Bzzzt! You touched the side!
Who could forget such educational and healthy hits as Captain Novolin? Dodge the bad foods and eat the good ones. Save the mayor. Diabetes education for only $69.95. Coming to an SNES near you!
Typically they dont know much. A while ago I heard a respected expert in internal medicine saying stupid things about hydrostatic pressure and osmotic pressure. If they dont know what are talking about they should not say anything, otherwise all pacients with a grasp of physics and chemistry are going to go away. They probably dont care because such pacients are rare.
Anyone remember that Voodoo Ad:
"We have a chip that could save lives[...] but we decided to use it for Games"
Linux is not Windows
http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics
Dude, they can hardly make a game that doesn't suck, let alone one that actually accomplishes anything. Maybe they should get their priorities straight.
Then again, anyone who's a programmer understands the sweet joy of doing boring work. Maybe if everyone knew how to enjoy working and accomplishing.... *ducks thrown tomatoes*
Personally, I've learned everything I'll ever need to know about medicine by playing Operation
But God demonstrates his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us - (Romans 5:8)
This concept has already been covered/done in ECG form in the late 90s...
m d= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9800006&dopt=Abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?c
http://www.biomedpatent.com/5876351.htm
Forget Glucoboy, play Gluco Pong!
(I made this game and the Carb Counting one about 3 years ago for this juvenile diabetes web site.)
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
...of a "socially acceptable" medical device now. I've always been offended by medical devices that saved lives.
They'll do it in no time.
Although they do have to learn some physics and chemistry usually the curriculum barely covers the basics. Despite this most premedical students complain that they have to learn too much physics and chemistry, which is not true.
kids forget to take medicane and really dont want to take blood sugar test but if was a little challege for them it may work.. i think it is a good idea
www.angelfire.com/dc2/stockman/index.html http://www.FreeFlatScreens.com/default.aspx?refer
Here's an interesting article about someone who is using a game to provide players with an approximation of what it is like to be schizophrenic, as an educational tool for people who interact with those who suffer from the condition (family members and caretakers):
m in ds_ey.html
http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2004/09/in_the_
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
one example, online, is the anticoagulant treatment simulator at http://warfarissimo.corlan.net.
:)
You must get the INR between 2 and 3, or between 3 and 4. Not much unlike the old moonlander game
Dr. Mario is NOT a real doctor! Do NOT let him touch your genitals!
This has been done before.. Freddy Pharkus: Frontier Pharmacist
I just got the Journey to Wild Divine game yesterday. It is a bit expensive at ~$160 though it includes a biofeedback device, Mac and PC versions, a couple small books/manuals, and a music CD. Anyway, so far it seems like it is pretty well done. They have a web site:
http://www.wilddivine.com/
I'm not affiliated with the company in any way.