Health care

Using game mechanics to solve health care problems

Plenty of teens can tell you about the therapeutic benefits of video games. Health care companies are increasingly looking at the value of games too.

That's because games offer incentives that health care providers can harness to alter patient habits. "Health behavior change is hard," Alex Tam, a senior interaction designer at frog design, said at the Innovation Learning Network conference for health care providers in Seattle hosted by the design consultancy. "It's frustrating. There's extra work."

Health care providers can use the tools of game design to innovate in prevention and treatment. That's important because patient behavior often gets in the way of their recovery. Physical therapy after surgery can be grueling, leading many patients to forgo, or delay it. Busy schedules can often get in the way of taking medication or checking important gauges of health such as blood-glucose levels.

Tam works with health care providers on building game mechanics into products. When faced with competition, timers and progression measurements, all the tools of game design, patients perform better. "Games get people engaged," Tam said. "They will play for hours and hours."

Take Expresso Fitness exercise bicycles. The indoor training cycles come with a video game that users navigate by pedaling. They get points by chasing and catching dragons, for example, or picking up coins. Cyclists spin faster and longer. "You're very focused on the game and not on your pedaling," Tam said.

Some games simply educate patients about treatments, which helps them follow proper protocols. HopeLab created Re-mission, a first-person shooter game, where a pilot named Roxxi travels through the bodies of cancer patients destroying cancer cells, battling bacterial infections, and managing treatments. It's not Call Of Duty, to be sure. But studies have shown that cancer patients who played the game at least one hour per week maintained higher levels of chemo in their blood and took their antibiotics more consistently.

"This isn't just blue sky thinking," said Teaque Lenahan, frog's director of business development. "There really are a lot of opportunities."

Updated at 9:15 p.m. to correct the spelling of Alex Tam's name. … Read more

Mayo Clinic: Man survives 96 minutes without pulse

When a 54-year-old man collapsed outside a grocery store on a cold winter's night in rural Minnesota recently, a bystander and a trained first responder who happened to be nearby came together to administer CPR.

Five minutes later, paramedics arrived, continued the CPR, and over the course of the next half-hour delivered six defibrillation shocks.

Then a Mayo Clinic flight crew arrived by helicopter, and they proceeded to administer advanced CPR on the still-pulseless patient. After delivering a total of 11 shocks, the team still couldn't get a pulse, so they upped the drugs, did CPR for two more minutes, and delivered the final, twelfth shock.… Read more

Time to give surgeons breathalizers?

Interested in the question of whether and to what extent a surgeon's skills are impaired the day after alcohol is consumed, researchers at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland devised a study where alcohol flowed freely.

Their findings: those who drank the night before performed worse--especially those with less experience.

"Historically, the medical profession has had a reputation for high rates of alcohol consumption," write the authors

The researchers conducted two studies. In the first, they randomly assigned eight male final-year science students at Queen's University to attend a group dinner and consume alcohol freely, and randomly assigned another eight to another dinner where no alcohol was served.… Read more

U.S. grad students create app to diagnose malaria

It isn't every day that the second-place winner of a competition is as interesting, if not more so, than the first-place winner. But at the national level of Microsoft's 9th annual Imagine Cup, competition is tight, and the team that took second in the software design category Tuesday deserves attention.

Called Team LifeLens, the students from universities across the country developed an app that uses a Samsung Focus running on Windows 7 to photograph blood samples and diagnose malaria. And they've only been working on it since November 2010.

Computer engineering grad student Tristan Gibeau of the University of Central Florida remembers the day he got the algorithm right to get the cell detector running. "I was ecstatic," he says. "I was running around, just so excited."

According to the World Health Organization, almost 800,000 people die from malaria every year, with 90 percent of the deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa. The beauty of the LifeLens app is that it doesn't require Internet access--just the phone, slide, and app. They're also building a case to hold it all.

Gibeau says the lens "is the last part of the puzzle," and that his team lost to first-place winners Team Note-Taker from Arizona State University because it's still buggy on Windows 7. They're currently working with UC Davis and the actual Windows phone team to get it running smoothly. (The prototype used version 6.5.)

The first-place team, by the way, developed Note-Taker, a camera and touch-screen tablet PC allowing users to simultaneously view live video and take typed or handwritten notes on a split-screen interface.

HAL-5: The exoskeleton robot 'to suit you'

On March 8 and 9, 2011, just days before the largest earthquake in its recorded history literally moved Japan 8 feet, the country played host to the inaugural International Forum on Cybernics 2011 in Tokyo.

While calling the event groundbreaking might qualify as crass, researchers showcased some truly innovative ideas in the world of cybernics, an emerging field that Japan's University of Tsukuba Cybernics department describes as the "fusion of human, machine and information systems." The word itself is a fusion of cybernetics, mechatronics, and informatics.

One of those ideas, the HAL-5 exoskeleton robotics suit by Tokyo-based company Cyberdyne, is a wearable device that helps ordinary people accomplish extraordinary feats, such as lifting objects they otherwise couldn't. (We covered an earlier iteration of this in 2009.) Think of the improvements possible for caregivers, people with missing or paralyzed limbs, the elderly who want to continue living independently, factory workers, etc.… Read more

Breast-milk ice cream: Test before you taste?

In February, the uber trendy Icecreamists boutique in London began serving a scoop of ice cream straight from the supple breasts of London mother Victoria Hiley. Her milk was screened at what parlor founder Matt O'Connor calls a "leading medical clinic" before being pasteurized and served in a martini glass with lemon zest and vanilla pods for 14 pounds, or about $22.50.

Not for long. News of the unusual dessert, dubbed Baby Gaga, swept across the Interwebs, and when two people complained to Westminster Council (perhaps notably, both were men), officers removed the product from the … Read more

It's a jungle (gym) out there for fitness network

There's a big question being explored right now about the intersection of health and social media: Does the tracking and sharing of personal fitness and diet data motivate us to get, and stay, healthy?

A host of Web sites and mobile apps are banking on the answer being yes. FitDay provides a free diet journal; Daily Burn offers logs to track diet, exercise, and weight; an Awareness app promises to upgrade one's mental software; and dozens of other sites and apps cater to specific types of diets, exercises, and desired outcomes.

So the just-launched Humana fit social network, designed to help users live healthier, more active lives, is going to have to offer some pretty stellar features to stand out.… Read more

Dude, your veins are off the shelf!

Not long after creating a functioning rat lung in her lab, Yale University Professor of Anesthesiology and Biomedical Engineering Laura Niklason is testing bioengineered human veins that could benefit some 500,000 patients a year who need to undergo vascular surgeries such as coronary artery bypass.

The tissue-engineered vascular grafts (TEVGs) were generated in a bioreactor using a relatively new tissue engineering method called decellularization--a process by which researchers remove a tissue's individual cells while leaving its structure intact. The veins are off the shelf and available at the time of surgery, and are said to be less likely to result in obstruction, clotting, or infection.

The findings, published this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine by researchers from East Carolina University, Duke, Yale, and Niklason's company Humacyte, suggest the veins could work in both large- and small-diameter applications (6mm and 3mm), be stored up to 12 months in refrigerated conditions, and provide unobstructed blood flow in large animal models for up to a year.… Read more

Smart house monitors inhabitants' health

Researchers at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom are unveiling a prototype system they say is designed to learn from its inhabitants, text if security is breached (or a door left unlocked), and now even monitor its occupants' health.

The InterHome, developed in a doll's house, uses a touch-screen control panel that enables online and smartphone monitoring and control from afar.

The house not only incorporates energy-efficient and security features that learn from the occupants' living habits (when lights tend to be on or off where, when the house is empty, etc.), but also a device that … Read more

CES: MobiCam monitors home, not just baby

LAS VEGAS--At the Consumer Electronics Show, there is a little corner of not-terribly-busy booths underneath a sign that reads "Mommy Tech."

Which is where an assortment of companies you've probably never heard of is hawking its mommy-centric wares, from bulky belts that tell you if your unborn baby is happy to digital thermometers and some kind of embroidery machine that sews, right there in front of your eyes, whatever you type into the machine, in a slew of interesting colors, in cursive. (Interestingly, this was a popular booth, although most onlookers were in suits, scratching their heads, … Read more