mHealth News: Eric Wicklund Talk with Michael Fergusson at the mHealth Summit

Excerpt from Ayogo’s CEO Michael Fergusson’s interview with Eric Wicklund at the mHealth Summits:

MF: Because it’s a fundamental aspect of human psychology to play, video games are taking advantage of what we are interested in. That’s why games work.  To keep you engaged in the game they try to mimic this effect that comes from real life – that you need to be progressively challenged. They isolate those important aspects of human psychology and execute them in a simple closed system.
MF: I have a different opinion about games and why games are important than many of my colleagues in the game industry. It’s important to take a look at what games have done so effectively to capture people’s attention and keep it – look at those design cues, those fundamental psychological techniques and apply them to healthcare.
EW: How would you work a game into chronic conditions <> and address somebody, say, with diabetes?
MF: It’s important not to do too much and not boil the ocean here.  We focus on solvable problems, things we know that work, where there is good, solid peer reviewed science, where we can see that there are outcomes. Now, it’s not really clear that we can build an application that somebody could use consistently for a course of say 3,5 years. There’s not a lot of proof, we just haven’t been doing it long enough. But we do know we can engage people for 3 and 6 months. Which is about the right amount of time if you want to help them build a new habit, say.  We’ve built…