GFH: Hurdles Facing Health-based Game Community

The health-based game community has grown significantly over the past few years, aided somewhat by the introduction of Nintendo’s Wii. As with any specialty segment, such expansion brings along growing pains, some of which were touched on in a discussion at Games for Health examining how the exergame field might keep advancing.

The panel, entitled How Do We Realize the Potential of Games for Rehab, Physical Therapy & Exergaming With and Without the Advancement of Commercial Entertainment Exergames, featured a group of researchers/developers and a representative from Best Buy.

The overwhelming arch of this conference has been talk about electronic medical records (EMR) and their interaction with health and rehab-based game data. Attendees, including healthcare workers themselves, seems to collectively dream of seamless, two-way communication that would keep EMR’s constantly updated. Such advancement would allow doctors and physicians to view an in-depth, day-to-day snapshot of a patient’s vitals.

Ernie Medina, from MedPlayTech, a company that focuses on games which promote family health, said that such a linked system would “Make our jobs a lot easier.” Such collaboration, however, is not currently happening in health care indicated Medina. One reason for that, alluded to by another panelist, is all the different technologies involved, and the difficulties in getting them to communicate, never mind merging, collecting and storing all that information.

Another potential hurdle: while Wii technology has been quickly adapted to health-based gaming, there is concern that Microsoft’s Project Natal and Sony’s PlayStation Move might be TOO sensitive and precise, which could limit their effective use for disabled or rehabbing gamers.

Belinda Lang, from USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, defined a few elements she considers crucial to health games: an adjustable level of difficulty, the ability to quantify progress (being able to measure physical improvements, which could lead to more widespread insurance coverage) and a relevance to real-world functions or tasks.

All this technology is kind of why Best Buy was involved too, as they want to assist the involved parties in bridging the technology gap. How? By selling all the equipment necessary to create such a bridge. The company seems to be struggling itself over trying to balance a value to society versus overall marketability.

One problem with advancing commercial exergames is that neither the manufacturer nor the retailer seems willing to advertise them as being able to provide such benefits. This situation has a current crop of products caught in a gray area; they are recommended by physicians, yet are unable to tout such recommendations due to regulatory directives.