Video Games for...Health?????

Hi!

So last night I had my first seminar class where we had the speaker I mentioned in my previous post.  This was seriously an incredible topic.  I walked into it a little skeptical I have to admit.  Video games about health?  How can that be interesting at all?  Well it's incredible what kind of research they are doing these days.  There are tons and tons of different researchers creating games for every age and every health related topic or disease or disability.  Two of the examples that she gave were ones she worked personally on, one was Bronkie the Brontosaurus, a dinosaur game geared towards kids and teens with asthma.  Basically in the game the person has to avoid all of the asthma triggers and keep their character from wheezing too much in order to win the game.  They did a large study with it and found that kids and teens who played the game had 33% less emergency hospital visits and days missed from school because of their asthma than those who played a different video game.

The other study they did was for kids and teens with Diabetes, the game had a similar concept only it was about keeping the character's blood glucose levels steady.  But they found with this one that there was a 77% drop in emergency hospital visits!  And this was just the average, some of the kids never went to the hospital to begin with who were playing so this is a huge number.  I think she told us that that would save about $2,000 per kid in health related fees, and I believe what she was saying is that it saves both the family as well as the health care system in general.

Basically it was really really interesting and I can't believe the kind of research they are doing in this field!  If this sounds at all interesting, I would definitely check out

www.healthgamesresearch.org

You can actually do a database search and see specifically what kind of research into games is being done in whatever area you are particularly interested in.

We'll see what happens after my video games class actually starts meeting, but I really am starting to become more and more interested in this field of educational video games.  So who knows where that will take me, but for now it's pretty dang cool!