Gaming for Public Health

Héctor M. Sánchez C.
sanchez.hmsc@berkeley.edu
[press spacebar to move through the slides]

I. Background & Rationale

a) The Problem

b) Why Gaming?

c) Remarks

a) The Problem

A lot public health problems can be reduced to some combination of really hard computational optimisation problems, and lack of data.
Search spaces tend to be so big that these problems become computationally intractable.

b) Why Gaming?

Gaming communities are an example of how motivated people are quite
impressive at solving really hard computational optimisation problems,
gathering, and analyzing data.

b) Why Gaming? [Optimization]

[World Record Progression: Super Mario Bros]

b) Why Gaming? [Optimization]

b) Why Gaming? [Data-Analysis]

b) Why Gaming? [Social Behavior]

c) Remarks

Motivated humans are good at solving problems. Computers are good at automating processes. How can we leverage the best part of both worlds?

II. "Gamifying" Public Health

a) Education

b) Education + Optimisation

c) Crowd-Driven Initiatives

a) Vax!

b) Pandemic 2|| Plague Inc

c) Crowd-Driven Initiatives

[Paper]

III. Questions & Discussion

Questions
1. What other insights, besides resource optimization and data gathering, could be gained from "gamifying" public health problems? 2. Platforms like Dengue Chat, Zooniverse and OpenStreetMap offer opportunities for volunteers to become involved in the research process.Can you think of any other online gaming/volunteer activities that could support disease control efforts? 3. How can we best keep people engaged and interested in these kinds of crowd-driven initiatives and educational games?