Alan Price had a successful career in the video game industry as chief technology officer for EA Canada.
But a desire to create games that would do more than simply entertain, combined with a transformation in his industry that has seen video games shift from consoles to smartphones and social networks, prompted Price to join the burgeoning digital health sector where he's creating wellness apps for kids.
It's a sector that's bringing together an unlikely mix of game makers and medical experts, engineers and researchers - all focused on a common goal of improving health.
For Price, his mission to help kids stay active and healthy is a very personal one. His daughter has Prader-Willi syndrome, a disorder that leaves her with an insatiable appetite and reduced muscle tone, making a regular exercise program vital.
"One of the reasons I went down this road is that I am personally affected by this challenge," said Price. "A few years ago I represented the BC Prader-Willi Association at a medical conference ... I sat there thinking all these people are doing something special for kids and I'm making games and yeah, it's fun to make games but there's a time in your life when you want to do something meaningful.
"For me that was kind of the genesis of me leaving that industry and saying 'okay how can I use my skills for some-thing more valuable?' And I came up with this concept - can I help kids get a little more active?"
The newest edition to the lineup at Price's start-up Digido Interactive is a game based on "Zoopnium," an element that seems to have escaped scientific discovery but has shown up in the game of the same name, where it's spontaneously created by movement. Collect enough Zoopnium and you can create Zoops, squishy and playful creatures to trade and build in numbers. The one thing you can't do playing the game is sit still. Every movement, whether it's walking down the street or playing a baseball game, earns Zoopnium - upsetting the traditional idea of video games turning kids into couch potatoes.
Prompting those small changes in behaviour that can translate into big returns healthwise is at the heart of Vancouver's Ayogo Games.
"As game designers we have this incredible power, we have this capability to influence people's behaviour and to influence their lives," said Michael Fergusson, Ayogo's founder and chief executive officer.
Ayogo teams up with non-profits to create games that combine social media inter-action with achievements and rewards. It's focused on getting people to take small actions that add up to better health.
HealthSeeker, a game developed for the Diabetes Hands Foundation in collaboration with the Joslin Diabetes Center that's available for Apple and Android mobile devices as well as on Facebook, is one such Ayogo success story.
"In HealthSeeker in particular in the first three months of play, players have done on average six health missions (that can range from eating more fruits and veggies to cut-ting back on fats). They're trying out new behaviours that hopefully will become habits over time," said Fergusson.
While smartphones and tab-lets provide a platform for wellness games, their ubiquity also makes them a useful tool in other health services.
Dr. Mark Ansermino, director of pediatric anesthesia research at British Columbia's Children's Hospital, has led a team that created a phone oxi-meter, a low-cost device that combines a smartphone with a FDA approved pulse oximeter sensor to measure oxygen levels in blood.
A pulse oximeter is a little device that goes on your finger or earlobe and measures oxy-gen in your blood. If you've ever been hooked up to one, more than likely it was in a hospital or in a doctor's care - it's an expensive medical device and not one you'd have at home.
But if Ansermino and his team are successful, the phone oximeter could become as common an item as a fever thermometer and offer monitoring in remote areas where patients can't drop by a local hospital or clinic to get tested.
"This is still a relatively expensive technology but we had this crazy idea to take a cellphone and turn it into an oximeter," said Ansermino.
That crazy idea turned into one of 10 proposals to receive funding from the project, "Saving Lives at Birth: A Grand Challenge for Development," jointly funded by Grand Challenges Canada, the U.S. Agency for International Development, Norway's Foreign Ministry, the World Bank, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The phone oximeter is being field-tested in Africa with pregnant women who are at risk of high blood pressure and its related pre-eclampsia, a condition that can be deadly for both mother and baby.
"In the developing world, it is the second leading cause of death in women - it is a huge issue," said Ansermino.
Daniel Schwartz, a clinical assistant professor at the University of B.C.'s medical school, is a practising internist and nephrologist and co-founder of QxMD, a Vancouver company that makes mobile software for health care professionals.
QxMD has half a million users using six different products ranging from the diagnostic tool Calculate to a soon-to-be released newsreader app for tablet computers that delivers a customized package of research and journal publications.
"All our software development is really focused on how do we leverage the fact that 80 per cent of physicians are using mobile devices and how do we facilitate the distribution, adoption and application of new medical knowledge," said Schwartz.
Schwartz said the latest app, called Read, is designed to shorten that time lag from the point when research is first published until it gets into widespread clinical use.
"You don't have to hunt for that information, you can have it pushed to you," he said.
The software tools are free and Schwartz said as a start-up, QxMD is focused on building "excellent products that really have a chance of changing the face of medical practice," although he expects over time there will be opportunities for commercialization.
BC Children's Hospital is among Canadian pediatric centres that will be testing a new iPhone app for children who are undergoing cancer treatment. The app, dubbed Pain Squad, was developed by Toronto communications and design firm Cundari to answer a need among pediatric oncologists to have children accurately report their pain.
Pain Squad enlists the kids in a mission, with actors from the casts of the police dramas Flashpoint and Rookie Blue encouraging the kids to help fight in the pain squad and giving them commendations, pro-motions and other awards for a job well done.
"Currently the focus in mobile development for health care is very much on supporting physicians," said Mike Orr, practice lead, digital and software strategy at Cundari. "I think the next phase of it will be supporting patients."
The first phase of the research study on the app, which Cun-dari created pro bono for Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children with the actors also donating their time, is just wrapping up at that hospital and will soon be deployed at three other hospitals, including BC Children's.
B.C. is attracting global attention for its innovation in this field. Michael Bidu, founder and CEO of Sanotron a, centre for digital health innovation and start-up accelerator, hears from people around the globe interested in advances here and, in June, government officials from Denmark will arrive in Vancouver to study the industry here.
"We have tremendous talent in B.C. and Canada that show leadership in this space," he said. "Our goal and the shift we are seeing in the market is from a health-care-centric sys-tem where the doctor is in the middle to one where the consumer is in the middle."
DIGITAL HEALTH: THE NEXT GENERATION
At the University of BC, digital health is a trend that starts even with teens.
UBC's eHealth summer camp is going into its second year, offering 60 students an opportunity to learn and try their hand at innovation in the digital health space.
Last year's camp was a success and suggests today's students will bring digital innovation to health care of the future. By the time it ended, there was already an Android smartphone app created that could tell when the person with the phone fell, an alerting system that could be very useful with our aging population.
To learn more about the camp, an initiative of UBC's eHealth Strategy Office and supported by Telus Health Solutions, check online at ehealth.med.ubc.ca/ education/summer-camp.
UBC's eHealth Strategy Office focuses on developments both at the university and in partnership with outside companies that use technology to enable and enhance health and wellness.
"I think there are a lot of exciting digital technologies that come to the foreground," said Dr. Kendall Ho, a practising emergency medicine specialist and founding director of the eHealth Strategy Office. "The question, in eHealth and for the ministry of health to look at is how can we use the technology as best we can to address the current health gaps we have.
"I think that is the first priority."
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Gillian Shaw
Quelle/Source: The Vancouver Sun, 28.04.2012
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