Tapping into the World of Gaming to Fight Opioid Addiction

What does World of Warcraft, Candy Crush Saga, and Angry Birds all have in common? They're all highly-addictive games developed by people who really understand how to keep people engaged with their products.  So it makes perfect sense that a life sciences tech company developing digital health tools would turn to people from the gaming world to learn how to keep people in treatment. "About five, six years ago my research team started to include people interested in big data and mobile health, and that really naturally led to me building Data Cubed as a tool for studying all kinds of things and using big data for research," said Paul Glimcher, a neuroscientist, psychologist, and economist who has been studying human decision making for 25 years and addiction for 10 years. "One of the things that really became clear to me as a scientist studying addiction ... was that people who were starting to use handsets just were not thinking that hard about how to keep people engaged." So Glimcher, the CEO of Data Cubed, and Hannah Bayer, the company's chief scientific officer, met with several video game experts for advice about developing an app that would keep people who are recovering from opioid addiction engaged in their treatment program. During one of these meetings, the video game experts asked Glimcher and Bayer what they were doing currently to keep people in treatment. "We said, 'oh we really know a lot about that, we know that y...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Digital Health Source Type: news