{"id":590,"date":"2013-12-02T09:06:54","date_gmt":"2013-12-01T22:06:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/?p=590"},"modified":"2013-12-02T09:06:54","modified_gmt":"2013-12-01T22:06:54","slug":"gamification-in-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/?p=590","title":{"rendered":"Gamification in health&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>people are more open to learning from a game than a powerpoint or clinician<\/li>\n<li>fun, competition, and social networks all have positive affects on health and fitness behavior<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Practitioners still haven\u2019t internalized the idea that we need to help people do the right thing. Not just by giving them the opportunity, but making them want to do it.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u201cDesigning engagement into social games is largely about manipulating dopamine response. Gamifying health allows us to hack into our natural feedback loops by engineering ways for us to get more dopamine for demonstrating good behavior.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Source:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.medcrunch.net\/whats-fun\/\">http:\/\/www.medcrunch.net\/whats-fun\/<\/a>\u00a0(via RWJF)<\/p>\n<h1>Gaming for Patient Treatment \u2013 What\u2019s Fun Got to Do With It?<\/h1>\n<p>by\u00a0<a title=\"Posts by Susan E. Williams\" href=\"http:\/\/www.medcrunch.net\/author\/susan-e-williams\/\" rel=\"author\">SUSAN E. WILLIAMS<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0Nov 6, 2013\u00a0\u2022\u00a08:48 pm<\/p>\n<div>\n<blockquote><p><strong>\u201cPeople rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.\u201d -Dale Carnegie<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thefuntheory.com\/\">The Theory of Fun\u00a0<\/a>is an organization devoted to social experiments in fun. In one experiment, they turned a staircase next to an escalator into a piano to see whether people would still opt for the less physically challenging escalator. Not only did people choose for the fun piano staircase; they also went up and down the stairs multiple times (see the results\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/2lXh2n0aPyw)\">here<\/a>.) Playfulness has increasingly become incorporated into patient engagement and adherence. Additionally, creative tactics like video games that use fun, competition, and your social networks have shown positive affects on health and fitness behavior.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"Gaming for Patient Treatment   What\u2019s Fun Got to Do With It? photo\" alt=\"RM2 Customer 1 Gaming for Patient Treatment   What\u2019s Fun Got to Do With It?\" src=\"http:\/\/www.medcrunch.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/RM2_Customer-1.jpg\" width=\"178\" height=\"178\" \/>Paul Tarini, team leader for the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.rwjf.org\/\">Robert Wood Johnson Foundation\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0Pioneer Portfolio, reported in 2010 that the collision of games and healthcare was inevitable. Featured that year at the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/gamesforhealth.org\/\">Games for Health<\/a>\u00a0conference in Boston, MA, were dancing games for patients with Parkinson\u2019s disease, or alternatives-to-smoking games on iPhones. Since, we\u2019ve seen an unveiling of companies that develop games benefitting all sorts of conditions from anxiety and depression (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.health2con.com\/devchallenge\/robert-wood-johnson-foundation-aligning-forces-games-to-generate-data-challenge\/\">SinaSprite<\/a>\u00a0by<a href=\"http:\/\/litesprite.com\/\">Litesprite<\/a>) to games for kids with cancer (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.re-mission2.org\/%23\/page\">Re-Mission2<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.hopelab.org\/\">Hopelab<\/a>). The results have been significant and have illustrated how patients feel more inclined to accept and learn from a game about their condition than from, say, a PowerPoint or clinician. In Re-Mission2, results showed how players adhered to their treatment longer and more consistently after interacting with the game. Even more impressive, players had higher levels of chemotherapy in their body and so were literally responding to treatment better.<\/p>\n<p>Michael Fergusson, founder and CEO of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/ayogo.com\/\">Ayogo Games<\/a>, a social gaming production company based in Vancouver, believes games are the key to patient engagement and adherence. Practitioners, Fergusson says, \u201c still haven\u2019t internalized the idea that we need to help people do the right thing. Not just by giving them the opportunity, but making them want to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><b>Prescribed Fun: The Trick (or Science) of Adherence and Engagement<\/b><\/p>\n<p>The\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/livepage.apple.com\/\">World Health Organization<\/a>\u00a0(click for report) has said that people around the world will benefit more from adherence than from new therapy. Esther Dyson, an active investor in the digital health movement, has said, \u201cIt\u2019s colossal stupidity that people aren\u2019t healthier, because we know how to do it.\u201d Yet, we don\u2019t. Our own inability to do what we know we need to is the cause of many health care problems.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps social games can help. Social games are digital games played with your online social communities (like Facebook and Twitter). According to Ayogo Games: \u201cDesigning engagement into social games is largely about manipulating dopamine response. Gamifying health allows us to hack into our natural feedback loops by engineering ways for us to get more dopamine for demonstrating good behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A recent NPR article,<a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/blogs\/alltechconsidered\/2013\/10\/30\/241449067\/how-video-games-are-getting-inside-your-head-and-wallet\">\u00a0\u201cHow Video Games Are Getting Inside Your Head \u2013 And Your Wallet\u201d<\/a>discusses how video game architects actively track children\u2019s engagement with the game they\u2019re playing. Inherent in any game design is research, tests, and analysis, all of which are imperative to making the game more fun, more engaging, and more likely to hold the player\u2019s attention longer, and in some cases long enough to buy something.<\/p>\n<p>The science of the brain and human behavior are integral to the success of a game. Many, especially parents trying desperately to get their kids outdoors, interacting with \u201creal\u201d things and \u201creal\u201d people, have more damning language about these studies than applauding. Indeed, most, when attributing the term \u201cbrain manipulation\u201d to something, don\u2019t have many nice things to say. Yet, looking at all this through a health care lens, if doing the same types of testing, tweaking and manipulation leads to positive and permanent change in health and fitness of an individual, it can\u2019t be that bad, right?<\/p>\n<p>Michael Fergusson believes this, and has created successful games where players\u2019 health and behavior improve because of it.\u00a0 One of Ayogo\u2019s first health care games,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/ayogo.com\/blog\/case-study-healthseeker\/\">Healthseeker<\/a>, was for people living with diabetes, and the first health care game on Facebook. They had over 15,000 players. There were parts that were extremely successful, but other elements that weren\u2019t. They reviewed the data and looked at what worked and what didn\u2019t to see what design elements of the game brought players success in their health goals. What they found was players who consistently received incoming messages of encouragement from their online social networks had significantly greater chances of success. Putting friends and family into their application, Ayogo discovered, makes the game more meaningful. As a result, this design element has been brought forward into other game designs.<\/p>\n<p><b>Team Fun<\/b><b>\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cMan is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.\u201d -Heraclitus<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Outside of the digital space,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/littlebit.org\/\">Little Bit Therapeutic Riding Center<\/a>\u00a0provides equine facilitated therapy to children and adults with neurological, pyshological, and physiological disabilities. For the riders, working with horses provides an overwhelming sense of joy, and the therapy no longer becomes treatment-like. Instead, it\u2019s fun and unpredictable. More, a rider\u2019s experience of success is linked to the team supporting her efforts \u2013 her volunteers, her horse, and her instructor. Play, joy, laughter, excitement \u2013 they all have healing powers for our minds, bodies, and spirits \u2013 and the value of your community in sustaining all that cannot be underestimated, whatever the method.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe experience of interacting with your own health can be dramatically affected,\u201d says Fergusson. Because of this you want the design of the experience to engage as many people as possible so that embedded in the design, is an evolving conversation where people can learn together and improve the quality of life together. To this, Fergusson asks an interesting question: \u201cThere\u2019s a question about who\u2019s behavior you\u2019re really trying to affect in social gaming \u2013 is it the person\u2019s behavior or the community of that person?\u201d Perhaps it\u2019s both that need to change in order for engagement and adherence to really stick.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>people are more open to learning from a game than a powerpoint or clinician fun, competition, and social networks all have positive affects on health and fitness behavior &#8220;Practitioners still haven\u2019t internalized the idea that we need to help people do the right thing. Not just by giving them the opportunity, but making them want &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/?p=590\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Gamification in health&#8230;<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,9,10,22,12,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-complex-adaptive-systems","category-healthcare","category-healthy-habits","category-policy","category-power-aphorisms","category-rapid-learning-health-systems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=590"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":591,"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590\/revisions\/591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}