Games for Health Conference in Baltimore

Thanks to Ben Sawyer for planning the Games for Health Annual Conference 2008 (Serious Game Initiative from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars) and inviting me to come to present. I saw so many facinating presentations and met some very interesting people. Here are but a few:

1. Play2Train, disaster training in Second Life, sponsored by the Idaho Bio-terrorism Awareness and Preparedness Program (IBAPP): video. I am already doing some collaboration with Rameshsharma Ramloll, Professor at the ISU Institute of Rural Health with Idaho State University and the founder of this group.

2. Whyville, a virtual world for kids, was discussed by Dr. James Bower, Professor of Computational Biology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the University of Texas at San Antonio.

3. Virtual Heroes and George Washington University's NEMSPI initiative (by a grant from Department of Homeland Security) for emergency medical services training was shown. Look at this link for a video.

4. Bart Bartlett, with Forterra , a company that builds simulations and virtual worlds, discussed some products they have developed for medical training.

5. Another project is the PULSE project from Texas A&M, Corpus Christi and the Office of Naval Research.

6. Fold It, a protein folding game to help develop drugs from University of Washington (Zoran Popovic, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering): FoldIt article.

7. Dr. Richard Satava, University of Washington Professor of Surgery, showed demise of the scrub nurse. See the related video . He also did a keynote on the future of medical training and surgery.

8. Many large hospital corporations and foundations were there too, supporting video games that taught preventative health and kept people physically active during them, as well as doing rehab with patients: Kaiser, Humana, Robert Woods Johnson, and others.

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