Using PlayStation Move, Video Game Helps Kids with Cancer Treatment

Some doctors are now encouraging children to play videogames. A team of professors and graduate students at the University of Utah have developed a video game that helps children with their cancer treatment. It’s specifically designed to “increase patients’ physical strength and give them a sense of empowerment to help their mental state while fighting their disease.”

The game is called PE Interactive (Patient Empowerment Interactive) and was created with Microsoft XNA and is played using the Move controllers on Sony’s PlayStation 3. The game follows a superhero main character, who is exhausted from fighting his arch-nemesis, but who grows bigger and more vibrant as the game progresses. Roger Altizer, who came up with the game design, said: “It is our goal that the patient will relate to the super hero, as they play more, he gets stronger”. Furthermore, all enemy mobs in the game are robotic, so that no living thing in the game is hurt or killed.

In one stage of the game, the player must stack bricks and spread mortar to build a wall in order to protect the inhabitants of an island from a tsunami. The wall is designed to simulate a patient working with their caregivers to re-build their immune system. “Something subtle, yet extremely important to the game is the use of metaphor and imagery,” notes Altizer.

The idea for the game came when Grzegorz Bulaj, an associate professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Utah, saw a child with a brain tumor using an incentive spirometer. A patient uses an incentive spirometer by blowing into the device, trying to raise the ball inside. It’s used to help encourage deep breaths in patients to improve the functioning of their lungs. According to the University of Utah News, “Bulaj realized this spirometer is nothing more than a game that encourages activity to help healing.”

Bulaj then enlisted the help of graduate students in the University’s Entertainment Arts and Engineering program to develop the game. There, they were met with a few obstacles: they needed to make a battle system without violence, killing, death, or gory graphics. They also needed a movement-based system which did “not interfere with the frequency of hospital monitors as some motion-controlled systems have been found to do,” a requirement that Sony’s Move was able to meet.

The task set before the developers now is to find a way to get the game to other hospitals and caregivers. University of Utah’s Pierre Lassonde Entrepreneur Center has given the task to a team of graduate students, who must find marketing opportunities to increase the availability and awareness of the PE Interactive game.