Gamification is a little bit like wrapping your dog’s heart-worm medicine in bacon. It takes an unpleasant or possibly mysterious process and turns it into something fun. More than that, it turns something with potential life-and-death significance into something we’re willing to undertake on a regular basis. The application of digital technologies and game-like functionality to improve patient outcomes and business results could be a huge disruption in healthcare. But how does it work?
What is gamification?
In the realm of medicine and healthcare, gamification provides an appealing interface for users as well as reward mechanics for completing mundane tasks. These reward mechanics — at their simplest these can be pleasing sounds or animations, for instance — could improve adherence to, or adoption of, new processes and recall of important information.
Some possible applications include:
- Simulation training for doctors
- Patience adherence studies
- Reminders to take medication
- Interactive methods for providing clinical information to patients in a way that “sticks”
- Medical education and goal-setting
- Progress measurement
- Easier clinical comparisons against known benchmarks or even comparisons with family/friends for a better understanding of holistic health
Clearly, everything from new drug research to physical therapy and patient education has the potential for major positive changes as this technology catches on. Consider the benefits to researchers, who will soon provide patients with detailed digital simulations and then gauge how they react to changing situations or stimuli on a psychological and/or physiological level.
Tools like these could ultimately help patients and doctors engage more frankly with one another, in more comfortable and non-threatening environments, about medical procedures and processes as well as the potential benefits and risks of treatment.
Using video games as a learning tool for doctors could drive better results than with doctors who “just” read the information instead. But there are benefits for doctors that go far beyond training. Thanks to gamification, doctors can also achieve better patient outcomes in a surprisingly direct way. Research by Kerfoot et al published in the Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes journal in 2014 found that an online spaced-education game showed promise in accelerating hypertension patients’ progress toward blood pressure goals.
Game mechanics, software platforms and user-friendly graphical interfaces can also empower doctors and pathologists to engage in, essentially, crowdsourcing. Not with money, as with Kickstarter, but instead with valuable information about their medical histories, their experiences with drugs and a host of other points of reference. This lets researchers group and analyse samples and information from much larger patient pools than they ever had access to before.
Benefits to patients and families
Children’s medicine is an especially difficult branch of healthcare. Apart from the obvious challenges of caring for developing bodies, giving children the information they need in a detailed, but also nurturing way, is absolutely critical.
To that end, an adventure game called “The Paper Kingdom,” one of the first of its kind, seeks to teach kids about the risks, realities and benefits of clinical trials. It was put together by the NIH and England Research Institutes to educate and give comfort to kids in uncertain times.
Gamification has applications in old age, too. Researchers can use digital tools to detect Alzheimer’s disease in their elderly patients much more quickly using basic video game mechanics that cleverly disguise valuable clinical trials.
Additionally, consider the benefits of installing apps on an elderly loved one’s smartphone or watch to remind them to self-administer or measure things like:
- Blood glucose levels
- Eating habits
- Exercise
- Time-sensitive medications
- Progress in recovery of mobility and general health following surgery or illness
What are the next steps?
A 2014 study, Taking the Pulse US, showed that 40 percent of doctors believed digital technologies could lead to better health outcomes for patients if they were implemented properly. Almost half of these physicians indicated they had already used mobile devices to share medical information with patients, including videos, still images and in some cases x-rays.
Ubiquitous smartphones are an excellent start to improving healthcare across the board. The adoption of these and other technologies is key to rolling out this disruption in a big way and making it “friendly” enough for mass appeal. Gamification turns something we’re already familiar with — a telephone, say, or the process of measuring our blood glucose levels regularly — and adds some element that satisfies the human requirement for validation and measurable, tangible progress. It sounds exploitive when laid out that way, but as we’ve seen, the results speak for themselves.
Think about reaching a step goal on your Fitbit earlier and earlier in the day or “closing the rings” in the Activity app on your smartwatch. That’s gamification. The next step is applying it to patient situations where the stakes are even higher.
Megan Ray Nichols is STEM writer and blogger
