Health Video Games Spark Interest, Try to Gain Traction

“In health games, players can take a first-person perspective as they make health-related decisions and experience the health consequences,” she says. “It’s trying things out, learning by doing and, thereby, gaining a deeper understanding of cause and effect. Players clearly see the link between their behaviors and their health. Also, games can be especially good at enhancing a sense of self-efficacy, or self-confidence, to carry out a health behavior, because players must rehearse that behavior repeatedly in a game until it becomes easier to do. They are striving to win the game, and if they must learn health skills and behaviors in order to win, they will try again and again until they succeed and then win the game. Our research has found that the self-efficacy gained by rehearsing skills during game play can translate into stronger self-efficacy for carrying out those skills and health habits in daily life.”

Research Support

With exercise so critical to managing symptoms for many people with rheumatic conditions and with a complex disease process to describe, games might be a particularly good fit in rheumatology.

In a 2011 study out of the University of Alabama, researchers enrolled 15 sedentary, African-American women with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), who were experiencing moderate to severe fatigue, in an evaluation of the Wii Fit game system in helping with symptoms.¹ The women participated in a fitness program using the Wii system three days a week for 30 minutes each session for 10 weeks. After 10 weeks, they reported their perceived fatigue, measured by the Fatigue Severity Scale, to be significantly reduced. Body weight and waist circumference were also significantly reduced.

There’s every reason to believe that video games can in fact impact behaviors through their effects on the psychosocial factors that lead to those behaviors. There’s also evidence that they even influence health outcomes.

“Findings provide preliminary evidence that Wii Fit motivates this population to exercise, which leads to alleviation of fatigue and reduced body weight, waist circumference, anxiety level and overall intensity of total pain experience,” researchers concluded.

Gather your defenses against a horde of invaders and take part in a war that’s as old as life itself. Immune Defense offers players the chance to employ real-time strategy on a nanoscale.

Another study found that virtual-reality telerehabilitation was associated with benefits in balance and posture control for multiple sclerosis patients.² Twenty-five controls received traditional physical therapy for 80 minutes, over two sessions, per week. Another 25 received telerehabilitation treatment with the Xbox 360 game console, monitored by videoconference. Researchers found an improvement in balance in both groups and concluded that the game “might serve as a successful therapeutic alternative in situations in which conventional therapy is not readily available.”

More Research Needed

These kinds of results are encouraging. But there is a lot of room for improvement in really understanding the effects that games can have on patients, in part because most of the games used are not made to order, according to a recent review article on the use of so-called “exergames” in multiple sclerosis.³