Video games ease patients' pain

Hospital officials looking to improve drug compliance or help patients with pain management might consider including video games in their armamentarium.

Kids taking multi-year chemotherapy regimens for leukemia, for instance, show 20% higher bloodstream concentrations of the cancer-killing medicines if they regularly play Re-Mission, a video game developed by the not-for-profit HopeLab in Redwood City, Calif. The game player's on-screen avatar traverses the bloodstream zapping rogue cancer cells.

“They created the game to get kids to see chemo as a superpower,” said video game champion Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broken. She headlined the morning session of CHIME's Fall Forum. “Kids who played this game for as little as two hours had better adherence for six months.”

Another video game getting significant attention after its use by severely wounded Afghanistan war veterans is Snow World, developed by research scientists in Seattle. The game distracts patients who are undergoing wound cleansing after severe burns—one of the most painful procedures in medicine. Scientists report it can be 30% more effective than morphine with none of the side effects.

The next medical frontier for games developers could be autism. Children with autism “are able to improve their social intelligence by playing team-based or cooperative games,” McGonigal said. “If you have to work in cooperation with someone else, you are forced to understand what their motivations are.”

The video-game-as-medicine space is beginning to draw private investment from insurers looking to improve drug compliance among young cancer patients. Cigna Corp. funded HopeLab to develop a second generation version of Re-Mission—but only after Stanford University and HopeLab researchers published a 2012 paper documenting the game's positive results. The company wanted a cellphone and tablet app for the updated game, which HopeLab dubbed Re-Mission 2: Nanobot's Revenge.

Follow Merrill Goozner on Twitter: @MHgoozner

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