Pioneering Ideas

Positive Emotions, Diverse Social Networks and Social Status = Positive Health?

We’re pleased to announce what is sure to be another engaging program from the Penn Positive Health Lecture Series. On June 24^th, Dr. Sheldon Cohen, Ph.D., will lead a talk on the roles that positive emotion, diverse social networks and perceptions of social status play in morbidity and mortality.  

Dr. Cohen, who is the Robert E. Doherty Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, has published work on the roles that stress and social networks can play in physical and mental health.  As part of his lecture he will discuss his experimental work where mental and biological predictors are assessed in healthy people before their exposure to the common cold virus.

The lecture series is part of the Positive Health project which is funded by the Pioneer Portfolio and led by Dr. Martin Seligman of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. 

If you have the opportunity to attend we’d love for you to share your thoughts.

Here are details:

Emphasizing the Positive: Positive Emotions, Diverse Social Networks, and Social Status Contribute to Lower Morbidity and Mortality

Date - Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Time - 12:00-1:00 p.m.
Location - Dunlop Auditorium, which is in Stemmler Hall at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia
Free and Open to the Public 

Games for Health: A Thought from Day One

Well, now I finally know firsthand what the buzz is about! Day one of this year’s Games for Health conference was a thoroughly enjoyable primer on this incredible field. Having been up since about 4 a.m. in addition to being brand new to this space, many of my notes unfortunately make less sense to me at the moment than I hoped they would. So rather than get into any of the specific topics raised during some sessions I attended, I’ll start and finish this health games post with a brief personal note. 

The one time I might have ever been anything approximating a gamer was during the Atari 2600 days, when like so many of my pals, I sported blistered palms from marathon sessions of Pitfall and Track and Field. During some background reading a few days ago, I came across some telling industry information from the Entertainment Software Association. One statistic that really stuck with me is that the average age of the most frequent game purchaser is not 17 or 18, but 39. I don’t recall if that stat spoke to people buying games for themselves or for their children, but either way it got me thinking. With all the incredible developments taking place in the field today, when my little guy hits the gaming age, I have a feeling his dad is going to catch the bug again, too.

Let the Gaming Begin!

Today the 5^th annual Games for Health conference kicks-off in Boston, MA.  The conference has sold out and for good reason: the schedule is packed with a dynamic lineup of speakers and sessions.  Pioneer has been a major sponsor of the conference since 2004 and we’re excited that it has grown to be the premiere health gaming event.   

Several of Pioneer’s grantees will feature their work during the conference:

• Debra Lieberman, national program director of Health Games Research, University of California at Santa Barbara, will be presenting on the “Age of Sensors,’ along with Marientina Gotsis, University of Southern California and Kevin Stanley, University of Saskatchawan, today at 2:00 PM.  A couple of Health Games Research grantees are presenting as well – Ann Maloney of Maine Medical Center will talk about social and psychological factors linked to exergaming play today at 4:30 PM and a team from Cornell University will update attendees on progress with their Mindless Eating Challenge game study tomorrow at 3:00 PM.  
• David Lowenstein from The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, will be moderating a discussion on ‘Games for Health and Education: A Policy Report’ also today at 2:00PM.  Look for news on an upcoming DC event on this report, to be held June 23.
• Ben Sawyer, President of Digitalmill and Games for Health Founder, will be leading two presentations during the conference. ‘Games for Health Potpurri: 10 Things We Might Have Overlooked until Now’ and ‘Health in Games: An Update’. Both sessions are tomorrow, June 12, beginning at 2:50PM

If you are at the conference you should stop by and listen to their sessions. 

These are just a few examples of the packed lineup that features the latest in exergaming, disease and health management, skills and workforce training, rehabitainment, epidemiology, and virtual worlds and health.  If you’re attending we’d love to know about which sessions or speakers you are excited to hear.

Also, we’re excited to see that HopeLab, with whom we partnered on Ruckus Nation, announced that they are collaborating with Virtual Heroes to create the next version of their amazing game, ReMission!, which helps kids fight cancer.  Funding partners include Vivendi, the Annenberg Foundation and the Lance Armstrong Foundation. 

As a reminder, Pioneer Portfolio will be tweeting throughout the event @pioneerrwjf and you can follow all live twitter feed from the conference here and here.  If you plan to tweet from Games for Health make sure to include the conference hash tag #gamesforhealth or #g4h09.  

A Series of Looks at Games for Health

June is shaping up to be an exciting month in the world of games for health and for the Pioneer blog.  For several years, Pioneer has been investigating how games can be used to improve health and health care. 

On June 11-12, leading stakeholders and creative forces from game firms, health institutions, the academic and research community and elsewhere are convening in Boston for the 5^th annual Games for Health conference. Steve Downs, the Pioneer team’s assistant vice president, and Ari Kramer, communications associate, will be at the event and will share ideas and information here and on Pioneer’s new  Twitter account. 

Later this month, we’ll be welcoming a series of guest posts on new evidence from Sesame Workshop’s Joan Ganz Cooney Center  on the power video games can have in addressing some of the most pressing health challenges facing America’s children.  The posts will explore the topic of games and games for health from a variety of point of views.  It’s going to be a month packed with interesting and challenging discussions on games for health and we hope you’ll join in! 

Join Us for Games for Health 2009--Boston, June 11-12

The 5th Annual Games for Health Conference is coming to Boston on June 11-12 with a packed lineup of speakers from game development firms, health and medical institutions, academic and research institutions and elsewhere.  The conference has grown in to the premiere event for networking, identifying new opportunities and sharing learning in this dynamic space.  This year features three game expo spaces, special tracks on both exergaming and cognitive health, and 55 sessions covering the latest in:

• exergaming
• disease and health management
• skills and workforce training
• rehabitainment
• epidemiology
• virtual worlds and health

Here's a sampling of some of the sessions and speakers - click here for a full program schedule to date and to watch a video on upcoming event highlights:

• Jacob Vogelstein, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab - Using Guitar Hero III to create a novel training and evaluation device for upper-extremity amputees
• Debra Lieberman, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara and Health Games Research national program - The Coming Age of Sensor-Based Health Games
• Paul Blair -- Capturing Wiimote & Accelerometer Data for Active Gaming Evaluation
• Ben Heckendorn, benheck.com - Modding and Hacking Game Hardware for Health: Ask and you might receive...
• Doris Rusch, MIT/Gambit - "Akrasia": Metaphorical Depiction of Addiction

Pre-conference workshops will also take place on June 10:  Games Accessibility Day features talks, networking and demos dedicated to making all games more accessible, and helping people with disabilities play their way to better health and wellness.  Virtual Worlds and Health Day looks more in depth at the potential of virtual worlds, which combine social systems with game-based interfaces and graphics to create entirely new spaces to train, practice and visualize. Such systems hold great promise for advancing health and health care through layering on of game play or enabling pure simulation or new forms of social interaction.

Click here to register -- a 15% registration discount is available by plugging in dmgfh09 to the registration code box.  Lodging and conference events are at Boston's Hyatt Harborside Hotel.  Please spread the word and hope to see you there!

From Health 2.0: Re-Imagining the Doctor-Patient Relationship

Several themes and memes emerged from the Health 2.0/Information Therapy conference over the last several days. One theme is the need to re-imagine the relationship between patient and doctor in order to prepare for a Health 2.0 world. In the past, doctors were the primary, if not the only, source of health information. Doctors defined what was relevant to patients' health (e.g. blood pressure, blood tests, height and weight), and they were responsible for collecting it whenever the patient came to their office. In the Health 2.0 world, patients seek information that is relevant to them ("given the pollen count today, do I need to take an extra dose of my allergy medication?"). This new dynamic views patients as sources of health-relevant information, much of which is collected outside of the clinical setting. Patients are no longer passive subjects, but "info-mediaries," as some attendees called them, in their own right.

 

Paul Wallace of Kaiser Permanente  and the Center for Information Therapy and Jamie Heywood of PatientsLikeMe debated the question during the session entitled "What is the Future Role of the Doctor?". Certain ideas and phrases -- in other words, "memes" -- filtered throughout the discussion, shaping the participants' efforts to rethink the relationship between patient, doctor and data. In order to get their minds around what this new relationship might look like, the panelists and members of the audience employed a few metaphors. These analogies quickly morphed into memes, and conference attendees referred back to them to summarize and simplify their perspective on the future relationship between doctor and patient. Here's a sampling:

1. Football: The doctor is the quarterback. She is the leader of a team, calling the shots. Perhaps she gets direction from the care coordinator (the coach). Where is the patient in this model? The patient is the all-important ball -- the object of coordination among different health care providers as they move it up the field.

2. Banking: The health care system is the banking system. Patients can access and control their health data via an online health management portfolio. The portfolio includes myriad tools, geared to different types of patients. In this model, the doctor is like a financial planner - she helps patients navigate the system.

3. Organization: The patient is the CEO of her body, and her doctor is a hired consultant.

While similar in that they place increased importance on the patient, these metaphors also reveal very different visions for the future role of the doctor.

Reporting Live from Health 2.0

I arrived at the Health 2.0 Conference bright and early this morning. At the urging of this very tech-savvy community, I joined Twitter and issued my first-ever Tweet. (For complete coverage of the conference, check out the 600 + following at #heatlh2con). Next, I popped into the Health2.0 Accelerator pre-conference meeting, where (among other things), we learned about how the Accelerator and Project HealthDesign will collaborate going forward. Afterwards, I spent some time fielding questions about the next round of Project HealthDesign at our expo booth. All before the conference officially kicked off at 1:30pm!

The first session initiated the debate over whether Health 2.0 and Information Therapy (Ix) are in tension or in synergy. We heard from Don Kemper, CEO of Healthwise, that Health 2.0 and Ix are the yin and the yang of translating data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge in to behavior change. Matthew Holt, founder of Health 2.0, countered that a “shared understanding is not necessarily enough to support a marriage between Health 2.0 and Ix.” Given the candid format and the diversity of the crowd here, we can expect more “great debates” to follow.

Check back for reflections on tomorrow’s sessions, including “The Future Role of the Doctor,” and “User-Generated content vs. Expert: What’s the best approach to Knowledge Creation?”

Nortin Hadler Lecture - Personal/Social/Policy Barriers to Wellness When it Comes to Low Back Pain

Next up, the Penn Positive Health Lecture Series features Dr. Nortin Hadler speaking on "Backbone: Personal, Social and Policy Consequences of Low Back Pain."  Nortin Hadler M.D., MACP, FACR, FACOEM, is professor of medicine and microbiology/immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attending rheumatologist at UNC Hospitals. Having analyzed the "illness of work incapacity," his most recent book is "Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America."  

The lecture will consider backache as a human predicament, a profound social problem, a medical issue, and a vexing public policy challenge.  Basing his critique on an analysis of the most current medical literature as well as his clinical experience, Hadler argues that regional back pain is overly medicalized by doctors, surgeons and alternative therapists who purvey various treatment regimens. Furthermore, the design of "health," workers' compensation, and disability insurance schemes thwarts getting well. For the past half-century, says Hadler, back pain and back pain-related disability have exacted a huge toll on modern societies, in terms of pain, suffering, and financial cost.

Here are details:

Date - Wed., April 22, 2009
Time - 12:00-1:00 p.m.
Location - Dunlop Auditorium, which is in Stemmler Hall at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia
Free and Open to the Public

Positive Health Lecture Series Kicks Off With Sir Michael Marmot

In 2008, Pioneer funded Dr. Martin Seligman to extend his influential work in the area of positive psychology in to the realm of "positive health"--a new approach to improving well-being that emphasizes “health strengths” rather than the conventional mix of disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention.  Building on progress in the positive psychology field, which applies validated interventions to boost the strengths and virtues that help individuals thrive in daily life, Seligman and his team are exploring whether positive health may reveal a variety of potent, low-cost approaches that can serve as a buffer against physical and mental illness and, more importantly, enhance people’s overall health strengths.

The project is hosting a speaker series that kicks off next week at University of Pennsylvania's Medical School.  First up is Professor Sir Michael Marmot, chair of the World Health Organization Commission on Social Determinants of Health and director of the International Institute for Society and Health, University College London.  Marmot will address the Commission’s work to examine underlying social determinants of health and how it is transforming global and national policy debates to improve health.

Admission is free and open to the public, so feel free to spread the word among those in the NJ/PA/DE area.  Here are the details:

Date: Wednesday, March 4

Time: 12:00-1:00 pm

Location: Dunlop Auditorium in Stemmler Hall at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, near 36th and Spruce Street in Philadelphia.

Need more specifics?  Click here.

Posting from TED: Bacteria May Be The World’s Best "Risk" Players

According to Dr. Bonnie Bassler’s TED presentation on Friday, bacteria operate inside your body in way that’s similar to the game of Risk.  Bassler’s a molecular biologist at Princeton and she studies the way bacteria communicate with each other.  She said they’ve found that bacteria send out a simple chemical signal that can only be read by bacteria of the same type.  When there’s enough bacteria sending enough like-minded signals, the bacteria launch an attack (technically, it exercises a specific behavior it’s genetically programmed to exercise…in some cases that could be good for the host, in others, such as with MRSA, it could be really bad).  This communication is called quorum sensing.

It’s more complicated and more elegant, though.  Bacteria have a second simple chemical signal they send out.  This one can be read by all bacteria.  It tells a particular type of bacteria what other types of bacteria are in the host and how much of it is there.  Too much of bacteria Y, and bacteria X won’t launch its attack/exercise its behavior.

In Risk, it was always one thing to get control of Australia and another to gain enough reinforcements to successfully attack another piece of territory.  And the question of whether to attack was always informed by the size of your opponent’s army.

Bassler’s work is more than just a game.  It suggests a new approach to dealing with bacterial infections, one that involves interfering with the communication mechanism of the bacteria.  This may open up whole new avenues for pharma companies working to fight infections in this age of intensified antibiotic resistance.  In a related vein, policy changes that could facilitate the development of new antibiotics were outlined in the report "Extending the Cure: Policy research to extend antibiotic effectiveness," produced under a grant led by Ramanan Laxminaryan.