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Harnessing the Health Powers of Gaming
conq writes "BusinessWeek.com has a piece on how some new videogames are being designed with health-related applications in mind. From the article: 'A stopwatch and a tub of frigid ice water are the standard tools medical researchers use to test pain tolerance. How long can a person keep his arm submerged? In an unusual project, last year researchers at the University of Maryland's medical center used the arm-in-ice water test to evaluate a new video game called Free Dive. The researchers found that their subjects — 60 children, ranging in age from 5 to 12 — were able to keep an arm submerged for about 19 seconds on average. If, however, they simultaneously played Free Dive on a PC with their dry hand, the kids could tolerate an average of 86 seconds in the icy liquid — an increase of more than 400%.'" Juan Rey also writes to mention a report from financial news group Bloomberg, saying that Nintendo expects that their upcoming diet-related software for the Wii will succeed the way 'Brain Training' has done with DS.
In another experiment, a gamer submerged in water was oblivious to a gradual increase in the temperature of the water. The gamers would continue to happily play until rescued, or until the games were turned off.
I've never heard of this pain tolerance test before, yet now I have a sudden urge to masochistically dunk one arm in ice water and then repeat the result while playing WoW.
I can just see this being used for field pain relief: I need a DS and New Super Mario Brothers, stat!
At least, next time I stub my toe, I might use it as an excuse to play a video game. (I might also have more 'accidents' if I can use this argument.)
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
> How long can a person keep his arm submerged? In an unusual project, last year researchers at the
> University of Maryland's medical center used the arm-in-ice water test to evaluate a new video game
> called Free Dive.
Sounds more fun than the average game from Bullfrog, anyway...
This proves my theory all along -- video games give me super-human powers! I must only use my powers for good... now, to find criminals using the dangerous properties of ice water to molest the populus... and show them just how well I can tolerate their weapon of choice!
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
I recall hearing on a science podcast a while ago that a similar technique is being tested in dentistry. It was reported that patients who wore glasses that showed them a movie were able to withstand significantly more invasive and painful procedures for longer periods of time before anesthesia was required. Since pain is created in the brain, it makes good sense that "distracting" the brain would make it significantly easier to withstand greater amounts of pain. The many anecdotes of soldiers sustaining horrendous injuries but fighting on without knowing would seem to corroborate this.
I wonder if it would be possible to train someone to consciously ignore the pain centre of the brain in this manner?
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
It seems to me that subjecting yourself to dangerous or painful situations for longer periods of time is exactly the opposite of a health benefit.
Pain is how the body tells the mind that it needs to cut out what it's doing because it's likely to cause a problem. While some degree of pain tolerance is a good thing, sitting there and ignoring pain to do something fun is quite dangerous. If you pull a muscle in the first quarter of a game of football, you sit out the rest of the game to avoid making it worse. Of course it's good for the rest of your team during that game if you play anyway, ignoring the pain, but it's not good for you to do so. You, at the very least, risk a greater injury.
This is obviously a good thing for the game company, since they get their users to ignore their own well-being to play the game more, but it is far from a good thing for the user.
Having a similar contest as a teenager in the Boy Scouts, we discovered that after a couple of practice runs...
We could keep our arms submerged until they died. The pain slowly climbed and then hit a plateau and then fell off as the receptors in the limb shut down.
So after a minute or two of having my arm underwater, we all decided that the contest had now become pointless. I waited to get some level of motor coordination back and went about my business.
What the hell kind of pansies do they do this research on?
Thanks for informing of us of what is happening in a parallel universe. Everyone knows that in this universe Maximillion Arturo is a professor of Cosmology and Ontology at the University of California, not a police spokesman in Michigan.
I spent a lot of time trying to find a decent dose of Percocet where I could be coherent but still deal with the pain levels. Anything that works to distract is good: I couldn't really read since I didn't have the concentration and I'd often fall asleep on a movie. I didn't play games, but I'll give it a try next time.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
This is not entirely new; This is allready known, and used, in several hospitals when painful procedures (eg. wrapping off/on new bandages on burn-wound victims) take place: Just drop the kid behind a console, and while he is busy playing his game, the doctor goes to work: The distraction helps out -a lot- for these kids, and is one thing you -don't- hear good ol' Jack Thompson include in his insane rants.
Besides distraction, there are a lot more applications for 'games' in treatments:
I worked on a project aimed at 'treating' acrophobia (being afraid of heights), by creating virtual environments of high places (eg. a highrise building) and then letting those people gradually experience the different heights and let them slowly grow accustomed to what is actually happening when you are in a high spot (objects getting smaller, less sound of below is coming through 'up there', etc).
The advantage of this method as I experienced it is being able to transfer someone to a high spot without physically going there (later on in the therapy the patients are encouraged to go to pre-arranged spots of varying heights) and being able to 'measure' the reaction of the patient to the different situations. (I was -very- amazed people (acrophobics) could experience the same scare-symptons (by lack of a better word) by only looking at a virtual image/video/game of a high-place: I actually saw a woman faint when she was 'on top' of one of my skyrise buildings *chuckle*).
I also experimented with interactive elements within the map, as to distract the people from actually going up there (it was a simple tracking-game, where the people had to answer questions while slowly walking up the staircase of the different levels of the building), and this seemed to help even more in letting people get acquainted with the heights.
All in all, this has been a very rewarding project to work on, and showed me that games (besides being great entertainment, and (underestimated) learning tools), also do very well in treating some of these illnesses.
> Nintendo expects that their upcoming diet-related software for the Wii will succeed the way 'Brain Trainig' has done with DS.
:-)
Brain Trainig!? Clearly, they need to create a game that involves correct spelling, unless they're trying to increase our tolerance for typos?
just weren't good enough?
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/. mods. Time to go back to GNAA trolling.
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Both before MobyDisk. Worthless
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks