By: Jacob Martinez
Health professionals have been trying to increase awareness about peoples sexual health and how to prevent diseases. One opportunity that these professionals have been looking at his creating some type of gaming app. This week I read “Creating a Theoretically Grounded Gaming App to Increase Adherence to Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis: Lessons From the Development of the Viral Combat Mobile Phone Game.” In this reading, the writer describes how much of an impact action-oriented iPhone gaming intervention can improve the percentage of men that take PrEP, a drug that reduces the chances of getting an HIV infection.
Recently, researchers have found that there has been a 67% increase in HIV diagnoses, among men in 2016. While doctors and researchers have been pushing all men to take PrEP, to prevent HIV, one of the biggest challenges that men are facing is the inability to receive the medication. Unfortunately a large group of people have been underserved through their health care provider. One way that researchers plan to increase the use of PrEP is by ensuring that the medication is not only cost effective, but is also easily accessed at different clinicals. Another way they plan to increase the use of the medication is by integrating the use of gaming technology. By utilizing this type of technology, doctors and researchers will be able to target the younger generation, since they may be more sexual active.
The gaming platform that the researchers talk about using will be successful by “using interactive and collaborative procedures to integrate the clinical experiences of YMSM taking PrEP. This new app development would be called ViralCombat, and will sample males ages 18 to 35 that follow a specific criteria. The 4 steps that apply to these individuals include: “(1) English-speaking, (2) currently taking PrEP, (3) reported having sex with other men, and (4) able to give consent and not impaired by cognitive or medical limitations as per clinical assessment.” I think that these four areas of criteria will help reduce any error in the study and will help researchers understand the success of the application. The app will be allowing users to shrink their character in the game and they have the ability to attack different infections and viruses. The narrator will describe how users can fight these infections, which educates all people about PrEP and how the medications works. Allowing users to to battle HIV and having the game become interactive, will decrease the number of HIV diagnoses.
Overall, I believe that hands-on applications allow users to pay attention to the game and want to play more. While I currently do not know any health education games, I do believe that from reviewing this study, we will see a great increase in the number of people that play the game. The game will educate more people about different diseases, and how to fight these types of infections. The younger generation is a great audience to target seeing that the males that get HIV are relatively younger, are open about the sexuality, and are more involved with video games on mobile phones.
Comments