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Healthcare IT

“Serious” games set to transform Health services

By Adrienne Valdez | 8 August 2011

Real-time visualisation technology penetrates the health industry through “serious” games for both patients and practitioners.

In an interview with FutureGov, Tim Laning and Jan-Jaap Severs, co-founders of Grendel Games, said, “Having fun is a very big part of being intrinsically motivated to learn things or do things that are hard to do otherwise. When you play, you learn and you’re never too old to learn, therefore you’re never too old to play.”

An example given was a game developed for patients with burns, set in a frozen place where there are polar bears and penguins in a wintry landscape. After certain tests, it was proven that patients’ pain had been alleviated. “It’s a subconscious thing, and it’s very powerful,” Laning said.

“In traditional rehabilitation, the exercise becomes the obstacle. With the game, what happens in the game is the obstacle and by overcoming the obstacle, the patients are actually exercising. Even if they are in pain, in a way, they have a mental detachment from what they are doing: this is very important in keeping people engaged in rehabilitation,” Severs explained.

Standardisation in terms of developing medical gaming technology has helped reduce costs by a large margin, he remarked.

Currently, Grendel Games is working on Visio Endosuite, a training application for laparoscopic surgery assistance. The new project borders on simulation and gaming because it’s fairly serious; it has to be fun, but it should be accurate as well.

According to Severs, “There’s always the case of liability for a hospital, there’s a lot of scepticism. We have integrated the validation route with the development route. When we start developing, we also start validation.” This is to provide direct and immediate input from medical professionals, according to Laning.

Grendel Games with partners, Motek Medical, LIMIS (Leeuwarden Institute for Minimal Invasive Surgery) and UMCG, Groningen’s Academic Medical Centre, develop serious as well as entertainment games.

In cooperation with The Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency (NFIA), an operational unit of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation, Laning and Severs spoke at the Serious Games Conference in Singapore.

The NFIA, set up 30 years ago, helps companies by providing them with free advice, information and practical assistance and by providing them access to a network of business partners and government institutions through its “Technology Matchmaking” service. TMS helps to generate a selection of suitable technology partners which may include research institutes as well as private enterprises.

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