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Mar 12 2012

Pioneer's Commitment to Health Games Profiled in New Games for Health Journal

Mar 12, 2012, 10:00 AM, Posted by Paul Tarini

I recently had the good fortune of sitting down with Bill Ferguson to discuss the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s pivotal role in health games research for the inaugural issue of the Games for Health Journal. In our talk, I detailed the Foundation’s early investment in the field, the challenges to advancing health games and some grantee findings to date.

Thinking about our conversation, I’m struck by how far the field has come since the early days of our health games support in 2004. Back then, there wasn’t much intersection between the games space and the health space, but Pioneer saw potential. So we worked with Ben Sawyer (@BenSawyer) of Digitalmill to do some community building within the gaming industry around health interests and funded the first-ever Games for Health Conference.   

Now, with seven conferences behind us and the eighth scheduled for June 12-14, 2012, in Boston, Pioneer can proudly claim we helped create and sustain a way for the games and health communities to come together. But we didn’t stop there.

Pioneer expanded its support to the Health Games Research national program, directed by Debra Lieberman at UC Santa Barbara (who is featured in a roundtable discussion of health games experts in the Journal), where we are seeing our 21 grantees test some fascinating ways health games can be optimally designed. They're exploring game features such as competition, collaboration, social comparison, social support, nurturing of characters, immersion in fictional worlds and alternate realities, interacting with a human-like robots to motivate exercise, using a mobile phone game as a substitute for a cigarette, and much more. And there’s more to come.

Health Games Research's work to identify a broad range of features that make for effective health games will help to further expand the creative horizons of future developers. Well-designed and well-implemented games can motivate and support prevention, lifestyle behavior change, and self-management of chronic conditions, and Pioneer is proud to be part of this work. We are excited to see a journal devoted to the research, development, and clinical application of games and health.

Check out the inaugural issue and read about the work of Pioneer’s grantees and others in this important field on the Pioneer Health Games homepage. Tell @pioneerrwjf or @gamesresearch what you think.

Nov 22 2011

Converging Ideas at the 2011 mHealth Summit

Nov 22, 2011, 9:55 AM, Posted by Al Shar

Sometimes things just come together. We funded the first mHealth Summit because it was interesting and pioneering, and it seemed to have a connection to a few of our Project HealthDesign grants. Then came our involvement with and support of Quantified Self, Open mHealth, the Stanford Mobile Health 2011 conference and the mHealth Evidence meeting. Other programs, like our national program Health Games Research, Games for Health Conference and the Reality Mining meeting that we funded at MIT in 2009, also have strong mHealth associations.

This is more than just coincidence--rather, mHealth focuses on many of the qualities that make Pioneer “pioneering.” mHealth has the potential to radically change the way health and health care is delivered, it is inherently oriented to the individual, and it is an area not yet burdened with the organizational and bureaucratic complexities of traditional health care. mHealth is a place where something radical can happen.

It is therefore particularly gratifying to see that Pioneer will be well-represented at the 2011 mHealth Summit on December 5-7 in Washington, D.C., with grantees featured in sessions on Open mHealth, The Evolution of Gaming and its Effect on Prevention and Wellness, and Wireless Patient Monitoring in Care Facilities: The Future of Wearable mHealth Applications, Devices, and Sensors, and with a  Pioneer-sponsored session, What I Really Need from mHealth: Five Perspectives on Value. This session builds on a discussion that began in August at a Pioneer co-sponsored workshop on mHealth Evidence.

I hope that you’ll be able to join us at the conference, tweet me at @alshar using #mHS11,  and help frame what I’m sure will be a very important discussion.