Institute For The Future

More on games for health

My last post described one of the 40 or so sessions planned for next month's Games for Health conference. Most of the presentations will focus on games that promote prevention, compliance, or treatment. In addition to the Fold It! Project (disccussed in my  last post), another exception to this line-up is an MMOG (a massively multiplayer online game) designed to train doctors to communicate more effectively with their patients. This strikes me as an interesting twist on the role of new media technology in health. Although designed as a training tool, its goal is not unlike that of our digital story--Patientology--to improve relations between doctors and patients.

The game, the brainchild of Fred Kron, M.D., an assistant clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has been in development for a number of years, and is now being commercialized by Kron's start-up, Medical Cyberworlds. According to a 2005 news