Adolescents diagnosed with chronic illness have a lifelong responsibility to maintain and promote their health. Chronic illness can impact life in a variety of ways: pain, fatigue, inability to take part in physical abilities, and feelings of hopelessness. To help overcome these challenges, adolescents commonly look to counseling, social groups, and similar online activities.
What would you do to help an adolescent with chronic illness regain control of their health?
The folks at InnoCentive.com are looking for exciting new ways to use gaming technology to help adolescent patients with chronic disease. Their new challenge, Games for Health: Inspiring Adolescents to take Control of their Health, will payout 10,000 bucks, with at least one award being no smaller than $5,000 and no award being smaller than $1,000.
The goal is to obtain a gaming product that helps adolescents with chronic illness create and maintain their own health. The winning solution will create a feeling of community, provide measures of success, and impacts real life behaviors. A teenager should actually want to play this game, rather than associate with homework!
The winning solution will support the larger Collaborative Chronic Care Network (C3N), a system based on collaboration between patients, clinicians, and researchers. C3N will enable these stakeholders to share information, experiences, and ideas to solve problems and improve health. It will operate both online (virtual worlds) and offline (the real world), so the winning solution needs to function effectively in both worlds.
Anyone is eligible to participate in this Challenge, from gamers to graphic designers to clinicians to the actual patients who would use it. Submit your solution by June 18!
Gaming technology has played an increasingly important role in enabling citizens to participate in scientific research projects.
EteRNA challenges you to build RNA molecules using a virtual molecule building kit; in the Finnish game, Digitalkoot, players fix mistakes in the index of old Finnish newspapers by saving animated moles; and in Phylo, you help researchers study DNA sequences by shifting and moving puzzle pieces.
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