Games for Health: Changing the Way We Think About Activity Sensors

It’s that time again -- time to get together at the annual Games for Health Conference in Boston with hundreds of games developers or designers (like me), health professionals, researchers, and people just really interested in this exciting space to learn and talk about how videogames and gamification experiences can work to improve health and healthcare.

Ben Sawyer and his team always do a great job of organizing this event. It’s my third time attending as a MeYou Healther, and it’ll be my second year speaking!

Monumental is the first iPhone app I ever helped create. In 2010, I attended to hear Trapper, our head of product, talk about the concept behind Daily Challenge, which we were hard at work building. You can watch a snippet from his talk here.

Last year, I spoke during the Mobile Serious Games Day about Monumental, our iPhone stair-climbing game.

This year, I’ll be talking about something entirely different yet equally exciting: what we learned building a minimum viable activity sensor game on top of FitBug. We tested the experience, code named “Hot Sauce,” within the walls of MeYou Health. During that time, I truly learned what it means to create something that’s minimum yet viable that you can glean enough data from to understand how to build what could very well be the first of its kind: an activity sensor experience built on top of any activity device.

You can catch my talk entitled “A Dash of Sensors: Game Design for a Minimum Viable Product Pilot” on Wednesday, June 13, at 2:30 p.m. in the Sensors and Gamification Track.

We haven’t spoken about this in the public yet, so if you come to my talk, you’ll be one of the first to hear what we’re working on next at MeYou Health and how we hope it’s going to change the way we think about pedometers and activity sensors. 

Hope to see you there!