It’s been 224 years since Paul Revere made his famous “Midnight Ride” from Boston to Lexington to warn the British were coming, but had Paul Revere been alive today he may have alerted people that the 5th Annual Games for Health Conference was being held in Boston on June 11 and 12. This year’s conference boasted a record number of attendees – nearly 400 people – and included over 55 sessions, three expo rooms, and two new tracks focused at some of the fastest growing areas in Health eGames – Exergaming and Cognitive Health.

I attended this year’s Games for Health Conference, giving a presentation on Healthy Advergaming and I also featured some new healthy gaming initiatives in the iConecto booth. At last year’s Games For Health Conference, we announced the launch of the Gaming4Health.com portal, the first online social network for Healthy Games. In addition to featuring updates to this portal, this year’s booth featured iConecto’s BrainXercise training for healthcare professionals. BrainXercise features a combination of cognitive training games and a number of skill and knowledge-based performance games developed by iConecto. The performance improvement games include fun titles like Associate Safety Leopardy (a quiz show like Jeopardy), Swine Flu Mania, and the Look-Alike, Sound-Alike Drug Matching game. The first deployment of BrainXercise is for Clinical Café, a social network for health care professionals focused on improving quality, safety and compliance, sponsored by Quantros, Inc.. Quantros delivers quality, safety and compliance reporting software solutions to thousands of hospitals and has hundreds of thousands of users.

In addition, we debuted the newly released exergame for the Wii, EA SPORTS Active. There was great interest in this game based on Kevin Chorney’s, the Producer of EA Sports Active, keynote speech. iConecto also gave demonstrations of the Gaming4Health.com space in the virtual world Second Life. This virtual presence makes it easy to give corporate demonstrations in a virtual space and show how immersive and entertaining training can be when combined with virtual worlds.

My presentation, titled “Health Advergames: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” took a comprehensive look at the history of Advergames in general, and how food companies, pharmaceutical companies, and organizations with a healthy behavior message are all trying advergames as a means to share their message. This is a topic area of extreme interest to the conference organizer, Ben Sawyer, who is hoping to have updates presented at each year’s conference. In the exergame area, companies like Disney and Kraft are developing games that use a dance pad and there is even a Sponge Bob SquarePants pedometer to encourage younger children to get active. In the healthy eating category, the point was raised about the power of food advergames to influence younger children’s desire for a given product. The caution is that there are many unhealthy food products also using advergames to sway children’s product loyalty. In the pharmaceutical arena, examples were provided from Mirapex (used to treat restless leg syndrome), Viagra and Nasonex. It was learned that the Viagra game was pulled because it failed to provide the FDA’s required product warnings within the game.

I believe the growth of health advergames will come from a variety of areas. These include: iPhone and other mobile applications, the use of advertising and advergames in virtual worlds, and the inclusion of health advergames as part of health-related web sites. The research has shown that web sites with games are able to capture audiences for longer periods of time.

Overall, this year’s Games for Health Conference was a great success. It is evident from the number and quality of the attendees that this particular area of Serious Games is being taken more seriously, both by game developers (like Nintendo and Electronic Arts) as well as those people from the medical arena that are looking at new and innovative ways to revolutionize healthcare.

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