As a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional), out helping my community of game developers and technology peeps, I’m often asked to talk at some event, speak at a user group or support a community in its open source work. in short, donating my free time to help others in a developer way.

Other times I’m supporting (or creating) open source projects and contributing code or skillz in projects that ultimately help a lot of developers.

And sometimes these goals are truly aligned when I help out at worthwhile events, donating time and code for a worthy cause, in this case the ICHealthHack, searching to Gamify Cystic Fibrosis treatments.

What is the ICHealthHack?

Quote from the ICHealthHack site:

In short, Health Hack is a program aimed at merging fun activities (such as games) with more serious and life critical tasks (like breathing treatments) together to make what are sometimes horrible or just very boring activities in to fun or at the very least entertaining things to do.

The program aims to go far beyond any one “Hack-a-thon” or event, to build a growing framework of tools, resources and code, to enable others to keep building fun and engaging programs to make treatment of Cystic Fibrosis (and other ailments) more rewarding, especially for kids, to ensure they engage better with their treatment.

Cystic Fibrosis?

The whole event is simply starting with Cystic Fibrosis and in particular one specific treatment as a Launchpad, the loftier goals aim to get more developers, students, bioengineers and mechanical engineers all on a similar platform to work together to make healthcare treatments more engaging and where possible, FUN.

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a genetic condition affecting more than 10,800 people in the UK and its effects are quite far ranging.  The most prominent issue that people with CF have is with their breathing.  Mucus builds-up in their lungs causing chronic infections, meaning that people with cystic fibrosis struggle with reduced lung function and have to spend hours doing physiotherapy and taking nebulised treatments each day. Exacerbations (a sudden worsening of health, often owing to infection) can lead to frequent hospitalisation for weeks at a time.

On top of that, their pancreas becomes blocked with mucus, enzymes required for digesting food cannot reach the stomach. People with cystic fibrosis often need to take more than 50 tablets a day to help digest food and keep respiratory symptoms in check.

Ongoing treatment for CF is long, laborious and no fun at all, requiring hours of repetitive exercise or treatment, which especially for children is very, very, very, VERY, boring.

Games to the rescue

It’s a scientific and well proven fact that kids LOVE GAMES!  So why not bring together the best minds from a wide collection of healthcare individuals, ranging from students, practicing physicians, CF physiotherapists and some big names in tech like Microsoft (tech and software), McKinsey&Company (data scientists) and Stent Tek (medical device research) .

They also brought along a few experiences game developers to help and join in with the project and make the development process easier.

THE CHALLENGE

For this first “hack”, entrants were set a task to “gamify” a specific course of CF treatment referred to as “Airway Clearance” which aims to help clear the mucus from a patients lungs by getting air behind the mucus and helping the patient to “cough up” or swallow the unwanted particulates.

Which sounds grand but involves the patient breathing in to a device (aimed at making the lungs vibrate) repeatedly in multiple sessions for approximately 30 minutes or more.  Sometimes a lot longer, which you can imagine is both very uncomfortable, laborious and no fun at all.

The devices used have been adapted through the use of a custom board called the Fizzyo device, which provides a few specific inputs related to the treatment itself:

The device also captures the data from the breathing sessions in order to help validate the effectiveness of the treatment and provide additional information to the parents, clinicians and the patient over the course of time.

The Treatment

The specific treatment being addressed in this challenge requires the patient to:

Patients need to focus on their breathing, NOT over exert themselves and ensure their full lung capacity is used (remembering that with CF patients, this can be greatly diminished).  All of these

What you have available

Given that patients need to hold on to the device during the course of treatment, usually with one hand but sometimes with two, we have a limited number of inputs with which to work with, namely:

Doesn’t sound much but can YOU make a game with these limitations?  Something to make patients (especially kids) WANT to keep coming back to do their treatment, to get higher scores or discover strange new worlds?

The Contenders

One lonely weekend, 8 teams of students huddled together in groups of 4 to battle it out to see who could come with the best idea, game, project to help with this particular treatment scenario.  With 48 hours at their disposal, they came up with some very interesting ideas!

1. Phlegm Buster

An interesting project that encompassed the whole treatment lifecycle for a patient.  Including a 3D shooting game where the player traded breaths for shots to defend themselves from hordes of oncoming zombie creatures.  They even demo’d their project running on a HoloLens of all things
What made this project really stand out though was the attention to detail with the stats that came from the players “session”.
* Using the data to give kids a competitive portal which they could interact with.
* A parent portal to track each session the child worked on, showing trends of use and early warnings of reduced lung capacity.
* A clinician portal to use the breathing data to help and aid future treatments.

On top of all that, they also went as far as planning to use 3D printing to create custom breathing devices with bolt on characters, that the players could earn points to collect more characters and allow the kids to customise their own devices for play!!.

2.Tower Blo