Serious Games for Healthcare: Applications and Implications: Applications and Implications

Arnab, Sylvester

Jul 2012 · IGI Global

About this ebook

With advances in technologies and revolutions in patient, trainee, and public expectations, the global healthcare sector is increasingly turning to serious games to solve problems. Serious games are applications with serious purposes, developed using computer game technologies more often associated with entertainment.

Serious Games for Healthcare: Applications and Implications will introduce the development and application of game technologies for health-related serious games. Further, it provides cutting-edge academic research and industry updates which will inform readers about the current and future advances in the area. Encapsulating the knowledge of commercial and noncommercial researchers, developers, and practitioners in a single volume will benefit not only the research and development community within this field, but could also serve public health interests by improving awareness and outcomes.

About the author

Sylvester Arnab (BSc(Hons) MSc PhD) received a PhD degree (2009) at the University of Warwick, UK and is currently a Senior Researcher at the Serious Games Institute (SGI), Coventry University, UK. His research interests and activities are mainly in the area of immersive environment and the application of technologies to address health, learning, and socio-cultural issues. He is involved in the coordination of the R&D activities under the EU-funded Games and Learning Alliance (GALA) - a Network of Excellence consisting of 31 partners including NATO and various game development projects, such as the Relationship and Sex Education project with the Studies in Adolescent Sexual Health (SASH) Group and a SGI Singapore. He was previously awarded the Prime Minister’s Initiative Partnership Development Grants for UK/ASIA in 2010 and the EU Transversal Programme Study Visit fund in 2011. He has various publications within the area of virtual worlds and simulation. He has been invited to speak at various events, such as the AI-MAS Winter Olympics in Bucharest alongside speakers from Adobe, Facebook, and Google. He was previously a research fellow at the International Digital Lab based at the University of Warwick working on projects operated under the EU Sixth Framework Programme, such as the Network of Excellence for Innovative Production Machines and Systems (I*PROMS), the Intelligent Robot Swarm for Attendance, Recognition, Cleaning and Delivery (IWARD), and INTUITION - a Network Of Excellence focused on Virtual Reality applications.

Ian Dunwell (BSc, MSc, PhD, ARCS) is currently a Senior Researcher at Coventry University's Serious Games Institute, where he recently led the final evaluation report for the UK Department for Transport's £2.5m Code of Everand, a serious game aimed at encouraging children to put learnt principles of safe crossing into regular practice. He has worked in intersectoral and international contexts across a wide range of European projects, including the FP7-funded ALICE, e-VITA, mEducator, and the Games and Learning Alliance (GaLA) Network of Excellence, as well as the forthcoming €3m MASELTOV project, which seeks to develop new methods of supporting migrant workers through technology. His research interests include integrating web semantics with game-based learning environments, as well as the application of robust evaluation methodologies and methods for effectively feeding back this research into design. Recent collaborations include acting as Director of Studies on PhD studentships addressing topics such as Avatars as Vehicle Interfaces (funded by Jaguar Land Rover Ltd.) and Internet Metadata as Embedded Game Content (joint funded by the UK EPSRC and PlayGen Ltd.), as well as consulting on steering committees for games addressing topics such as childhood obesity, triage response, sexual health, and infection control.

Kurt Debattista is an Assistant Professor at the International Digital Laboratory. Prior to this, he worked as a Research Associate on EPSRC grant EP/D069874/1 at the University of Bristol and as an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Malta. He has a PhD in Computer Science in selective rendering from the University of Bristol and an MSc (distinction) by research in Parallel Computing and Systems Programming from the University of Malta. He has a first degree in Mathematics and Computing from the University of Malta. His research, published in over 35 refereed journals and international conferences, has focused on selective rendering for adapting computation for rendering methods, parallel graphics for speeding up global illumination, and multithreading for shared memory multiprocessors. His current research focuses mostly on interactive realistic graphics and serious games. [Editor]