technology
Game on
The much-maligned video game may be about to become one of the good guys. The use of the technology in rehabilitation is gaining street cred.
Stuart Smith interviewed by Dallas Bastian
Video games are often in the news for negative reasons but one academic has urged health professionals to be open to the potential improvements the technology can make to the lives of people in their care.
Stuart Smith, professor and business development coordinator at Southern Cross University, discussed the use of video games in healthcare and rehabilitation in his presentation at the Digital Health Summit in Melbourne.
During his presentation, Smith delved into some successful technological interventions, such as the use of games like Fruit Ninja and Dance Dance Revolution to help reduce fall risks in older adults and improve stroke rehabilitation.
Aged Care Insite speaks with Smith about some of the other uses of gaming technology in healthcare and why the interventions work.
ACI: You spoke today about the use of video games in health and rehabilitation. We’ ve covered a few instances where healthcare organisations have rolled out gaming technology in their care. What are some examples of gaming technology that you’ ve seen that have been effective or successful? SS: There’ s quite a [ wealth of ] literature now in the research evidence based around the application of games in health context.
To give you an example, in cancer in children, one of the big problems is getting kids to take their medications and to adhere to their medications over time. There’ s a game that has been developed by HopeLab called Re-Mission. It’ s like a firstperson shooter game. This particular game – which is actually an educational game about the impact of drugs on cancer – has shown to be really, really good at getting kids to increase their adherence to medication and also increase their understanding
of the progress of their disease. It has also been shown to lead to better self-efficacy, better self-awareness. That’ s just one of a range of examples that we’ re starting to see in the research literature around how games are being used to address health issues.
You also spoke about the use of the game Fruit Ninja in stroke rehabilitation and how the movements required to play the game are similar to those that are required in rehabilitation for stroke. How would organisations go about rolling out games that they believe would be useful in their care? It’ s a combination of a number of things. With the Fruit Ninja game, in particular, I was saw a lot of the lateral arm movements that stroke rehab patients need to engage in during their progress, say, post a stroke. Those kinds of movement, repetitive movements, are really boring. A game like Fruit Ninja, which gets you to move your arm repeatedly across an iPad screen to chop fruit in half or even jump around in the world – I think there’ s now a virtual reality version of Fruit Ninja – those kinds of movements, body movements, map onto the game play really well. They also map onto the kinds of movements that you want people to engage in during rehab.
So it’ s about people within health and really just thinking about the sorts of games that are out there that they may play themselves on the way to work, on the bus or whatever and thinking to themselves:“ How might this be useful for my patients?”
If it’ s an issue of trying to engage your patients in greater levels of physical activity, how might you explore some of the digital games that are out there?
To give you an example, the Pokemon Go game that swept the world recently was really effective at getting people up off the chair and out and about in the community and engaging in physical activity. A lot of health workers started to think:“ How can I use Pokemon Go as a game to get my patients to be active?” So it’ s just thinking about the needs of your patient and then starting to explore what kinds of games are out there already.
Why does gaming help people engage in their care and rehabilitation? Is it that it makes things like fall reduction or rehabilitation exercises less boring? I think games really bring to bear a lot of things that are deeply fundamentally human. Within the design of games is a strong
38 agedcareinsite. com. au