Games for Health Conference 2009

Games for Health Conference 2009
The Games for Health Project presents the Fifth Annual Games or Health Conference. Our best event yet promises to provide great insight to the growing worlds of exergaming/active games, health training games, disease management efforts, and much much more. Our conference platform provides attendees with great content, important networking opportunities, and a focus on providing opportunities to develop new projects and improve existing efforts.

Complete conference details follow...

Houston Games for Health Day (Regional Meetup!)

On Thursday, December 4, 2008, the Games for Health Project announces a one day event for Houston, TX. This regional event offers a chance to get a great introduction to the games for health field including an excellent chance for local and regional networking.

Location : Rice University, Duncan Hall : McMurtry Auditorium (Rm 1055)

Schedule
Our single day plenary schedule is still coming together but already includes the following talks:

Barbara Chamberlain, Jeanne Gleason, Pamela Martinez (New Mexico State University) - Exergaming & CYFAR
Jim Bowers (UTHSC San Antonio) : Why Eat in Whyville?
Chuck Hamilton (IBM) : Virtual Environments & Healthcare
Nina Fefferman (Tufts) : Social Behavior and the Dynamics of Corrupted Blood in World of Warcraft
Claudia McDonald (TAMUCC) : Avatars & Diagnosis: Experiential Learning in Virtual Space
Miguel Encarnacao (Humana) : HG4H: Humana's Games for Health Initiative

The schedule will also feature a variety of short project summaries for a variety of regional academic institutions and companies.

Cost : Tickets are $49.00 until November 26, 2008.

After that tickets will rise to $79.00 for all attendees. Cost of attendance includes lunch and after-event reception.

General Public Tickets may be purchased online at: https://www.regonline.com/gfhhouston

Rice Students and faculty may attend the event free-of-charge. Students need to email their intention to attend the event to bbryant@dmill.com

Game Jam Mini Report

The Games for Health Project held its first ever Games for Health Game Jam this weekend at the University of Baltimore in Baltimore, MD. Seven teams competed for $4,000 in cash prizes. The prototypes they built had to deal with the issue of caloric differential (i.e. many people are eating slightly more in calories then we expend - about 150-200 calroies on average per day.) in just 24 hours.

All seven teams produced some level of prototype. A student team from the University of Baltimore won by designing two mini games (of an envisioned series of mini-games) that were designed to help people think of the ever small number of things they can do to reduce the calorie differential in their daily lives.

Click here for a few photos from the event. We will have a full report later this week with screenshots and more from all the excellent entries. A big thanks to all the participants and the University of Baltimore for making this a great event. Expect more sponsored Jams in the future.

Announcing The First Experimental Health Game Jam at University of Baltimore October 18-19, 2008

This fall on October 18-19 (Saturday/Sunday) the Games for Health Project along with its partners will sponsor a experimental game jam to foster rapid development of prototypes that result in games people can play to learn about and improve their personal health.

The Grand Prize winner will receive $3,000 from the Games for Health Project.  An additional prize of $1,000 will be offered to the best student-built game.

The Jam will be held starting Friday Evening at the University of Baltimore. Please Note: All participants will receive exact location on campus and final schedule 1 week prior to participating.

QUALIFYING & REGISTERING TO COMPETE
The Health Game Jam is open to individuals and teams of all shapes and sizes, including student groups, independent game developers and individuals with programming chops. Participants can register for the jam by sending their information to gamejam@gamesforhealth.org.

Participants must be or have a team with at least one programmer with demonstrable game development programming experience using either Flash, XNA, OpenGL, PyGame, etc. Please provide an example of past work, however basic or advanced, to qualify. Teams may include up to six members with varying skills. All team members must be 18 years of age or over to participate, or be accompanied by a parent or legal guardian at all times during their participation.

Any questions about participating may be addressed to gamejam@gamesforhealth.org.

FULL PRESS RELEASE & DETAILS ON THE EVENT WHEN YOU CLICK THROUGH...

Slideshare Archive Started for Conference

We've begun getting speakers to post their presentations using Slideshare. As they do please visit the event site on Slideshare to see them:

http://www.slideshare.net/event/games-for-health-2008

VIDEO/ONLINE GAMES FOR HEALTH COME OF AGE: FOUR MAJOR TRENDS NOW EMERGING

Streaming audio from today's telenews conference: http://www.hastingsgroupmedia.com/GolinHarris/050808GamesforHealth.wma

VIDEO/ONLINE GAMES FOR HEALTH COME OF AGE: FOUR MAJOR TRENDS NOW EMERGING

Emerging Developments Outlined As Games for Health Conference Gets Underway; Health-Oriented Innovations - Such as Guitar Hero Modified for Arm Amputee Rehab - Gaining Ground.

BALTIMORE, MD. & WASHINGTON, D.C.///May 8, 2008///Four major emerging trends -- exergaming kicks into high gear, video games go to rehab and therapy, major health care providers arrive on the scene, and the rise of video games for first responders and medical professionals - were highlighted today during a telenews event conducted by organizers of the Games for Health national conference (http://www.gamesforhealth.org) taking place May 8-9, 2008 at the Baltimore Convention Center.

Drawing on 60 planned presentations by 75 speakers, Games for Health conference highlights trends including:

* Video games go to rehab and therapy. In a Games for Health conference highlight, a version of the popular video game Guitar Hero will be unveiled that is designed to aid arm amputee rehabilitation ... Red Hill Studios will present its findings about the use of PDWii to aid balance and mobility in Parkinson's patients. PDwii is currently being developed by Red Hill Studios and the UCSF School of Nursing, with funding by the NIH. Quantifiable results are being used to track patient progress and are being integrated into the patient's overall regime. Results will be used to benefit further innovations in the field of games for health . . . For younger patients, there is Ditto, a multi-modal distraction device designed to control pain and stress among patients undergoing burn and orthopedic medical procedures.

* Exergaming kicks into high gear. One Games For Health panel will explore how exergaming in gyms and other settings can be used to combine physical activity and fun. Another presentation will focus on "Zyked" - a set of online and mobile services designed to be for working out what Xbox Live! is for videogames. Zyked's creator Tom Soderlund will present the basics behind Zyked and report on how the first batch of user tests are going. Soderlund will also present how Zyked intends to work with a multitude of portable devices including digital music players, digital athletic gear and mobile phone platforms. Dr. Alasdair Thin of Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, will outline in "Go for the Burn: Designing Body-Movement Controlled Video Games to Maximise Energy Expenditure" his thoughts about how to future exergame design should work to ensure maximum health benefits.

* Major health care providers arrive on the scene. For the first time ever, a major U.S. health care insurance company, Humana, is a primary sponsor of the Games for Health conference. The sponsorship reflects the medical community's increasing interest in the potential of games. Representatives from several of the largest health insurance plan providers in the United States will convene in a plenary session at the conference to detail the game-related efforts they've launched to date and their view about what is needed for the future to use games and games technology to solve critical problems in health they and others are facing . . . Another new development: the K.I.C.K. (Kid's Interactive Creation Kiosk) is a touch screen system and software activity package developed with young children in mind. Initial design of the system was focused on hospital waiting rooms and other similar healthcare settings. Developed by a team of graduate students at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center the project was originally titled "Project ER" and aimed to lower stress for 60,000 children who visited Pittsburgh Medical Centers ER each year. During the test run the project gathered considerable research on how to deploy such systems in healthcare settings and will share this knowledge during a case presentation of the K.I.C.K. system. In order to see games for health play a greater role in settings where healthcare is delivered, significant hardware and software delivery problems need to be solved.

* The rise of games for first responders and medical professionals. Conference attendees will have an opportunity to play with 3DiTeams. Funded by the U.S. Army Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC), 3DiTeams was developed by Virtual Heroes with Duke University's Human Simulation and Patient Safety Center, and lets people interact with a fully 3D simulation of emergency health care environments ... Medical Cyberworlds is a startup in the process of creating an online multiplayer game to train doctors to communicate more effectively with their patients. Dr. Fred Kron, the founder and CEO of the company and Noah Falstein, the lead designer will present an update at the conference on the state of the project and discuss the challenging process of encouraging effective collaboration between physicians, academics, and game developers.

Other conference highlights include a presentation by Nina Fefferman of Tufts University about the "Corrupted Blood Syndrome" content of the popular World of Warcraft online game. In September 2005 designers and programmers at Blizzard Entertainment created new game content for Blizzard's mega-hit massive multiplayer online game World of Warcraft that inadvertently unleashed an in-game epidemic. Later called the Corrupted Blood Disease, this virtual virus event was well covered in game and technical press but little else about this event and what insights it might offer to epidemiologists has been presented. Fefferman will present her work looking into the Corrupted Blood Disease as an epidemiological event. The talk will cover what knowledge of the event exists outside of Blizzard, developer of World of Warcraft, and based on interviews with Blizzard staff. While this is not the first game-based epidemiological event in a game or virtual world the Corrupted Blood Disease event is one of the most famous and interesting to date and provides an outline of the roles games can play in improving our understanding and possible responses to such events in the future.

ABOUT GAMES FOR HEALTH

Founded in 2004, the Games for Health Project supports community, knowledge and business development efforts to use cutting-edge games and game technologies to improve health and health care. The Pioneer Portfolio of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is the lead conference sponsor and a major supporter of the Games for Health Project. Over three days, more than 300 attendees will participate in over 60 sessions provided by an international array of 75 speakers, cutting across a wide range of activities in health and health care. Topics include exergaming, physical therapy, disease management, health behavior change, biofeedback, epidemiology, training, cognitive exercise, nutrition and health education. This year's conference includes presentations by Dr. Richard Satava; Starlight Foundation; HopeLab; Realtime Associates; Virtual Heroes; XRtainment Zone; Archimage; Dr. Mark Baldwin of MindHabits; Electric Owl Studios; Noah Falstein of The Inspiracy; and Games for Health co-founder Ben Sawyer.

The Games for Health Project is produced by the Serious Games Initiative, a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars effort that applies cutting-edge games and game technologies to a range of public and private policy, leadership and management issues. The project also produces the Games for Health Conference, now in its fourth year. The Initiative founded Games for Health to develop a community and best practices platform for the numerous games being built for health care 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, health care and policy. For more information, visit www.gamesforhealth.org.

CONTACT: Ailis Aaron Wolf, (703) 276-3265 or aawolf@hastingsgroup.com; and Elly Spinweber, (703) 741-7513, espinweber@golinharris.com.

EDITOR’S NOTE: A streaming audio replay of the Games for Health telenews event held today will be available on the Web at http://www.gamesforhealth.org as of 6 p.m. EDT.

Games for Health Press Release: Presents Content for Fourth Annual Conference

Games for Health Presents Content for Fourth Annual Conference

Baltimore Convention center : May 7-9, 2008

April 22, 2008 - (Portland, Maine) – The Games for Health Project (www.gamesforhealth.org) today announced its agenda for the fourth annual Games for Health Conference. The conference will be held May 8 to 9, 2008, at the Baltimore Convention Center in Baltimore, Md. Pre-conference workshops on May 7 provide day-long events devoted to virtual worlds and health, as well as games accessibility. Together, the meetings will cover the intersection of next-generation game technologies, health and health care.

Registration for both the conference and the pre-conference workshops is still open and program materials are now available on the Games for Health Web site at: www.gamesforhealth.org

Pre-Conference Workshop Schedule : Games Accessibility Day

Games Accessibility Day @ Games for Health

On May 7 at the Baltimore Hyatt Inner Harbor the Games for Health Project will host a pre-conference workshop on accessibility for games. The agenda for this great event is now complete. Tickets to the event itself are only $129.00 if you register only for the workshop and $99.00 if you register also for Games for Health. Tickets to the Games for Health Conference which follows on May 8-9 are $495.00.

Tickets to each event may be purchased directly at: http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaID=146432

Click through for schedule...

Pre-Conference Workshop Schedule (Virtual Worlds & Health)

Virtual Worlds & Health Day @ Games for Health

On May 7 at the Baltimore Hyatt Inner Harbor the Games for Health Project will host a pre-conference workshop on virtual worlds & health. The agenda for this great event is now complete. Tickets to the event itself are only $129.00 if you register only for the workshop and $99.00 if you register also for Games for Health. Tickets to the Games for Health Conference which follows on May 8-9 are $495.00.

Tickets to each event may be purchased directly at: http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaID=146432

Click through for the schedule...

Sessions at Games for Health 2008

We're are nearly final with our expected program for Games for Health 2008 on May 8-9 in Baltimore.

Please click through to see many of our exciting sessions!

We're planning close to 40 sessions including sessions on epidemiology in World of Warcraft, Game Addicition, Nurse Training, Rehabitainment, and a special session with some of the biggest companies in healthcare.

Our final program will add about 18 more sessions currently being summarized to be announced later next week.