GAMIFICATION & SERIOUS GAMES IN HEALTH by PHARMAGEEK

Technologists have reached incredible heights in getting people to voluntarily spend large amounts of their time playing video games and now entrepreneurs are combining those practices with neuroscience to create many exciting new startups.

How gaming works as a prescription

Imagine you’re at the doctor’s office and she hands you a prescription as you walk out of the clinic. Instead of heading to your local pharmacy for a bottle of pills, though, this Rx entitles you to a set of 30 sessions on a video game console.

WellDoc, founded in 2005 as a software prescribed by physicians to better manage diabetes as part of its BlueStar program, is seeing tremendous results in their clinical studies and with patients.

“We are not only seeing reductions in A1c, but also reductions in acute utilization and control, reduced blood-glucose scatter. We have to look at control of extreme out of bound events and we are seeing significant reduction in those. We saw in one study a 15 percent reduction in acute utilization,” said WellDoc’s chief strategy officer Anand Iyer.

Video games as medical devices are succeeding, and more are arriving on the market each year.

What is driving this trend?

A few elements are coalescing to create the environment for games to succeed as medicine.

1) There is a real, unmet need in many areas like mental health.

2) People are already gaming, so healthcare is “going with the flow.” Smart technologists who are leading “software as a medical device (SAMD)” are working with easy, everyday life practices to help transform patient adherence. What do people already enjoy doing, and do effortlessly?

Technologists are hoping that by leveraging the addictive quality of video games, they can help people stay the course on their therapy regimens.

3) The drive to lower healthcare costs encourages digital solutions. 

Video games, being both more addictive and more affordable, could have an intrinsic advantage over big pharma in the cost arena.

The future of gaming as therapy

This new digital frontier is exciting, but there are some challenges to commercializing these products. We tend to think that giving kids with ADHD a video game would be fun, but it’s important to remember that these games target the very thing that kids have difficulty with.

“It’s a tough game for them, and they’re exhausted at the end,” said one of the panelists. “It’s important that the game be designed so that the kids don’t get overwhelmed and give up, saying ‘This is hard, I’m going back to Minecraft.’”

In order to be viable, digital products must understand the underlying science of the condition they’re treating

more at https://www.medicaldesignandoutsourcing.com/how-video-games-could-take-market-share-big-pharma/

Deep mind will use data available to it via a new partnership with Jikei University Hospital in Japan to refine its artificially intelligent (AI) breast cancer detection algorithms.

Google AI subsidiary DeepMind has partnered with Jikei University Hospital in Japan to analyze mammagrophy scans from 30,000 women.

DeepMind is furthering its cancer research efforts with a newly announced partnership.

The London-based Google subsidiary said it has been given access to mammograms from roughly 30,000 women that were taken at Jikei University Hospital in Tokyo, Japan between 2007 and 2018.

Deep mind will use that data to refine its artificially intelligent (AI) breast cancer detection algorithms.

Over the course of the next five years, DeepMind researchers will review the 30,000 images, along with 3,500 images from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and historical mammograms provided by the U.K.’s Optimam (an image database of over 80,000 scans extracted from the NHS’ National Breast Screening System), to investigate whether its AI systems can accurately spot signs of cancerous tissue.