Prescription Games: Video Game Advancements in the Medical Industry

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Prescription Games: Video Game Advancements in the Medical Industry

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In a previous post couple of posts I talk about Building the Future of Our Planet at the Nano Level. I feel like this dovetails into that post really well and having worked on video games in the past I know how much of an emotional and mental impact they can have on a person.

Video games are coming into all aspects of society. Even sometimes crypto feels like a game. But there's always Decentraland and MANA coin. I guess that's actually a game. Anyways, let's get into this!

It's a new idea, and I actually have never thought of it this way until learning about this company called Akili Interactive. They are a prescription digital medicine company. They create video games to help treat and cure things. It's insanely cool and opened my mind for other video game uses beyond entertainment.

Video Game to Help Children with ADHD

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This is interesting to think of. Perhaps in the very near future, we will see doctors prescribing video games to help treat children. Project: EVO was fundraised by a company in Boston who was able to raise $30.5 million in venture capital to create the game.

How does it work?

Project: EVO can be played on phones or tablets. It creates a virtual world that players can interact with (obviously since it's a game). Through the game, players are supposed to focus on certain elements while ignoring or moving around others. This is the conditioning that they mean to do in order to help the brain organize information and prioritize. This helps children stay focused on the game's task.

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Akili Interactive has the slogan "Imagine what medicine can be". This is in reference to how digital medicine is something they see in the future and plan on being a deep part of making that happen.

Essentially they were able to retain the high-quality gaming experience and make it medicinal. Even an action game that in the future parents will be vouching for their kid to use.

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"Akili Interactive is a prescription digital medicine company combining scientific and clinical rigor with the ingenuity of the tech industry to reinvent medicine." Source

Essentially, Akili is transforminng medicine and healthcare for the better by creating digital tools which are "therepeutically active" and using them as digital medicine.

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Other projects they are working on:

• AKL-T05 - This is being designed to help treat Multiple Sclerosis. (in budgeting stage)
• AKL-M01 - This is being designed to help monitor cognition. (in budgeting stage)
• AKL-T03 - This is being designed to help treat Major Depressive Disorder (in pilot stage)
• AKL-T02 - This is being designed to help treat Autism Spectrum Disorder (in pilot stage)

Video Games and Trauma Detection

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Funded by the National Institutes of Health, this study goes in depth basically to see if specific educational video games can improve the decision making in detecting the severity of trauma in patients.

Night Shift is a game that helps train physicians at non-trauma centers how to recognize trauma levels. A good example Futurism uses is: noticing non-fatal gunshot wounds vs failing to perceive internal bleeding caused from falling. Source

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Basically, 368 physicians who work at non-trauma hospitals were picked from all around the United States. Half of the physicians were given the game to play, the other half had to read educational information about trauma. The ones who played the game, in the end, outperformed those who had reading materials. This was found by running a questionnaire and a separate simulation.

Initial results:

Game group: failed 53% of the time sending trauma patients to the correct hospitals.
Reading group: failed 64% of the time sending trauma patients to the correct hospitals.

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After 6 months

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Game group: failed 57% of the time sending trauma patients to the correct hospitals.
Reading group: failed 74% of the time sending trauma patients to the correct hospitals.

This is actually a fairly significant spread.

The game does a good job at showing the physicians the consequences of their decisions and how their actions can lead to larger mistakes.

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Instead of the app saying what happened and what to do, the app immerses physicians in these stories make it more realized. Often physicians learn about patients who died from certain issues when they didn't receive the treatment that they should have.

Check out the full study here.

Games like this will be used more and more in the medical field in the near future.

Video Games and Autism Therapy

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Floreo is a startup (Venture and NIH backed) that takes Virtual Reality platforms and finds the correct type of social immersion and communication technology needed to help treat people with Autism. Hundreds of autistic kids have been tested using this and they have found it being extremely calming for them. You can change the complexity and essentially the sensory density so that they would be customized to each individual child and engage them better than conventional therapy.

http://floreotech.com/

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I don't know the prices of the other games, but Floreo prides themselves on being affordable at the mobile VR price point. It also automates data analysis and capturing so that every way they interact is monitored.

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Video Game VR and Chronic Pain Treatment

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Karuna labs uses VR for their "Visual Embodiment Training" which allows patients to begin overcoming chronic pain. "Karuna's Virtual Reality technology uses Pain Education, Graded Motor Imagery, and Movement Science to retrain the brain. Using predictive coding, patients are guided through corrective exercises in a 6-12 week protocol to treat chronic pain. Karuna tracks session data for playback and clinician review, facilitating better clinical care and research." Source

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The perks of this is that it is founded on evidence that shows it works, it's drug-free and non-invasive as other treatments can be, and has traceable data that allows people to track progress.

They break down how it actually works better than I could explain here: http://karunavr.com/how-it-works

Virtual Reality Game to Improve Eyesight and Lazy Eye

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Vivid Vision created the world most advanced lazy eye treatment. Over 100 providers are using VR as a system to treat binocular vision problems such as lazy eye.

They use a hardware that delivers different images to two eyes.

How it works

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https://www.seevividly.com/

The best part is that it's a quality product with scientific backing that you can treat yourself from your own home and schedule.

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Conclusion

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Here's the thing. There are tons of other options for games that are improving tech, but I felt like from the ones I found, these are of the better.

Steemians, do you think the prescription games could have a strong hold in the medical industry in the near future? Please comment below, if you like the post please follow along @playitforward.