Vadim Gerasimov and Walter Bender
The project explores how to make information collected by personal health-monitoring devices fun and engaging, and consequently more useful to the non-specialist. The approach is to design and build computer games and scenarios based on such information. The research will focus on generally healthy people who may be interested in preventing health problems, as opposed to people with a particular disease. The ultimate goal is to make people take care of their own health implicitly by altering their habits and by health-aware planning of their lives. The basic hypothesis is that fun (the fun of learning, achieving, competing) is a way to achieve this goal. The research will include the development and testing of entertaining software that uses the health information. A personal health monitor capable of measuring EKG, temperature, respiration, and other physiological parameters is being designed in the course of this project to enable the interpretation of health data in vivo.