Exploration of the Serious Games Taxonomy

Definition

Serious games for education in health care are focused on the training of health care professionals.  This includes providing training and assessment for nurses, doctors, hospital staff, surgeons, midwives and any other persons employed within services which provide health care.  The aim of these games is to make theoretical medical and health care knowledge more available to students (Sliney & Murphy 2008), provide orientations of medical and emergency environments (Barnett et al 2009) and give procedural simulations and practice in health care situations (Wagner et al 2002).

Example Games

• Midwife education in Second Life is an initiative of several universities in New Zealand.  The objective is to provide nursing students with orientations of birthing suites and an understanding of the birthing process.

• The Virtual Patient is a Serious Game project at the Carl J Shapiro Institute for Education and Research.  Its objective is to provide medical students with access to virtual patients for practicing their diagnosis skills (Huang et al 2007).

Virtual Patient Screen Shot

Research Papers in Domain

• Fukuchi, S. (2009) Teaching a multidisciplinary approach to cancer treatment during surgical clerkship via an interactive board game, in The American Journal of Surgery, Elsevier, vol. 179, no. 4. pp 337-340
• Tashiro, J. (2009) What really works in serious games for healthcare education, in Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Future Play on @ GDC Canada, pp. 3-4, ACM, New York.

Developers

• BreakAway Ltd.
• Play2Train

References

Barnett, D., Everly, G., Parker, C. & Links, J. (2009) Applying educational gaming to public health workforce emergency preparedness, American Journal of Preventative Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 28. no. 4. pp 390-395.

Huang, G., Reynolds, R. & Candler, C. (2007) Virtual Patient Simulation in U.S. and Canadian Medical Schools, Academic Medicine, Wolters Kluvwer, vol. 82, no. 5. pp 446-451

Sliney, A. & Murphy, D. (2008) JDoc: A Serious Game for Medical Learning, in Advances in Computer Human Interaction. IEEE, pp. 131-136.

Wagner, C., Schill, M. & Manner, R. (2002) Intraocular Surgery on a Virtual Eye, in Communications of the ACM, ACM, vol. 45, no. 7, pp. 45-49.