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I recently attended the 2 day Games For Health Conference in Baltimore, MD in early May to get a handle on the "state of the art" in the emerging area of "serious healthcare games". This conference was sponsored by The Serious Games Initiative (www.gamesforhealth.org) and The Pioneer Portfolio of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (http://www.rwjf.org/programareas/pioneer/programarea.jsp?pid=1140).

The YouTube trailer for this initiative can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjGJTST8DSg.

The Conference slides can be all found at: http://www.slideshare.net/event/games-for-health-2008.

The conference was well attended with a broad variety of players (no pun intended) in this space from game developers to healthcare professionals to educators to academic & clinical researchers to health systems and pharma marketers. Most of the applications I saw are taking place in academic institutions, health systems environments (rehab & fitness centers) and within select online environments (websites and virtual worlds).

An eye opener for me was the variety of games that have healthcare applications:

1) casual games, like Peggle and Bookworm (www.popcap.com), which have stress & pain management as well as mental health applications, owing to the meditative states they can induce,

2) exer-games, like those built for Nintendo Wii and XBOX Live!, which have physical fitness and rehabilitation applications. I saw cases of health systems using incentive programs which require the use of such games in order to promote fitness as well as cases of use by rehab centers and the military to help stroke, workman's comp and battlefield victims regain motor skills,

3) simulation games, which are being increasingly integrated into medical, surgical, emergency and dental training to facilitate low risk training, strategizing and collaboration with and among professionals as they prepare for real-life, and often stressful, scenaria, and

4) knowledge games, which educate and prepare patients to take a greater role in disease prevention and self-management in areas of diabetes, HIV/AIDS, vector-borne infections, nutrition, traffic safety, brain health, mental health, etc.

This conference was a real eye opener. The game medium is an idea whose time is coming as trends related to 1) self-care, 2) holistic healthcare (which blend traditional treatment and alternative prevention paradigms), 3) blended medical and healthcare learning and education(for professionals & consumers) and 4) adoption of on demand digital media channels continue to accelerate globally.

Please take the time to look at the links above and to comment about any additional resources or projects you know of in this space.