Eye on Innovation: Games-Based Personal Health Records
We spoke with Ben Sawyer, president of Digitalmill, Inc. in Portland, ME, and co-director of the Games for Health project, to learn how resources from the gaming industry...
We spoke with Ben Sawyer, president of Digitalmill, Inc. in Portland, ME, and co-director of the Games for Health project, to learn how resources from the gaming industry (ideas, code, and technology) can be applied to healthcare, and how the ways in which a character’s information is represented in a video game could be utilized to create more intuitive personal health records (PHR).
How did you come up with the idea for game-based PHRs?
As part of the Games for Health project, it's my job to think about how resources from gaming (ideas or code or otherwise) can be applied to health and healthcare. It occurred to me that there are certain aspects of the ways we represent information about a character in a game that could be useful for representing information to people about themselves in the real world. From there, I started building up ideas and putting forward a few very simple notions and concepts about how we can use the PHR as a metaphor and tie it in with the various ideas we had in Games for Health, such as collecting health information (like exercise information) that could then feed into an avatar [a visual representation of a player in a game] to determine, for instance, how fast you ran in a game.
I also submitted some ideas through the PHR redesign grant call that Robert Wood Johnson did (part of Project HealthDesign). I had an idea for a game-based PHR workforce that didn't get accepted (I didn't think it would) but I used it to spur further thought on the subject. What I've developed, although not released in public form other than at a conference, is a version of what we submitted for the grant that outlines a lot of the thinking and which forced me to go out and see if there was any relevant research. Eventually, it is my goal to see some prototypes get built of these ideas, as well as some paper prototypes that might articulate the actual framework by which these ideas could work, especially if these ideas could sit atop an existing PHR framework, interpreting the data stores from various PHR databases and rendering out the information in a graphical, more game-like look and feel.
How would the information look in the PHR? Really good role-playing games--such as Dungeon Siege, Neverwinter Nights, or World of Warcraft--have what is commonly referred to in game design circles as a "paper-doll/drag-and-drop interface," which graphically depicts the state of your character and allows you to drag and drop information. I envision the patient's information in the PHR appearing like this.
Will patients find it easier to enter information in PHRs with interfaces like this? I think interfaces such as these would be easier for people to understand and allow for information in the PHRs to be more accurate compared to information gathered by patients rating their pain on a scale of 1 to 10 or answering how frequent their pain is. All the information that tends to get asked at intake or by the doctor could be entered into the PHR by a patient in the waiting room or from home. It allows for a much more accurate metaphorical means by which patients can describe what they're feeling mentally or physically with their care providers.
There is some emergent research that shows, especially among kids, that they tend to be more honest when using computers to fill out information than when providing it verbally to an adult. They also tend to have very strong feelings about relationships between on-screen characters and themselves. We don't know everything about that, but it gives us reason to believe that there might be ways we can use the interface methods that kids are familiar with from video games to create a PHR-like system or tools that would resonate with younger kids, especially those that might be dealing with chronic illnesses and conditions.
More on the Games for Health Project The Serious Games Initiative founded Games for Health "to develop a community and best practices platform for the numerous games being built for healthcare applications. To date the project has brought together researchers, medical professionals, and game developers to share information about the impact games and game technologies can have on health care and policy."
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