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
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?
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
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?
Diabetic kid: "MOM! If I don't keep playing, I'll die!"
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
"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.
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.
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).
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.