The Journal of mHealth Vol 2 Issue 4 (August) | Page 44
Gaming for Health
Gaming for Health
By Phyllissa Shelton and Rebecca Scott
The future is here and almost everyone
under the age of 60 is familiar with gaming and computer technology. This is
surely the next big innovation in healthcare as we seek to hand more responsibility for health outcomes to patients
themselves and continuously find ways
of reducing unwarranted costs.
Examples of how gaming is achieving
these things are being seen today at the
National Star College Cheltenham which
cares for young disabled adults. More
widely gaming technology is being trialled in a range of healthcare centres for
patients with a variety of musculoskeletal conditions.
Gaming in Action
engaging and motivating for patients, featuring powerful audio and visual stimuli
to help them overcome their limits and
regain their motor abilities by exercising.
Patients at the National Star College
present with an array of conditions, predominantly Cerebral Palsy and Acquired
Brain Injury. These patients have generally experienced a great deal of physiotherapy throughout their lives and the
opportunity of offering new, interesting
and motivational treatment activities is
key to keeping them motivated and on
board with their treatment plans.
One of the important features of MIRA
is that it gathers a large variety of statistics during game play, providing effective
performance and exercise compliance
monitoring of patients. Additionally, it
functions as a diagnostic tool that measures range of motion (ROM) angles of
the affected limb before and after the
rehabilitation session and several other
physical indices, such as the level of pain
or stiffness for a specific limb.
Whilst the use of technology doesn’t
replace the patients’ traditional physiotherapy, it plays an important role in augmenting therapy and could potentially
reduce the need for more traditional
therapies.
It is a valuable tool for Physiotherapists
who are able to prescribe a set of MIRA
exergames, bespoke for their patient, and
be able to monitor the patients' performance qualitatively as well as quantitatively measured by the platform.
At the National Star College, selected
patients are incorporating specific gaming exercises within their therapy programme, with promising success. The
gaming technology being deployed is
MIRA, a software platform of virtual
games with the purpose of aiding physical rehabilitation therapies and diagnosis
processes of several orthopaedic and
neurological disabilities.
The sensor commonly used by the platform for user interaction with the software platform's games and diagnostic
tools is the Microsoft Kinect, a 3D camera sensor PC compatible. This device
has the capability of recognising the 3D
location of H