Games For Health 2014

Games for Health is the leading professional community in the field of health games, bringing together the best minds in game development and health care to advance game technologies that improve health and the delivery of health care. Our mission is to foster awareness of, education about, and development of games that make a positive impact on the health of communities and health care.

The Games for Health Project supports community, knowledge, and business development efforts to use cutting-edge games and game technologies to improve health and health care. The Pioneer Portfolio of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is the lead conference sponsor and a major supporter of the Games for Health Project.

Keynote Speakers

Vander Caballero-Creative Director, We Are Minority

Vander will be talking about the design and development of Papa and Yo, which covers issues around alcoholism, and abuse, and Silent Enemy, We Are Minority’s forthcoming iPad game about bullying.

Learn more about Vander at http://www.weareminority.com

Michael Astrachan-President, Creative Director, XVIVO Scientific Animation

Michael will be sharing his experience leading a top health, science, and medical illustration, and animation team, well known for working with Harvard’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, on The Inner Life of the Cell.

For more about Michael at: http://www.xvivo.net

* Exhibits vs. case studies : As the games for health field moves more toward seeing more finished, deployable projects and entrepreneurial activity we’re creating a larger exhibit space and encouraging talks that were previously case studies and demos of games to be available in hands-on demos in our exhibits area.  This will foster more face-time with attendees, and provide a platform for projects and companies to move beyond a small 20 minute demo of their efforts.

* More tutorials & briefings : We’re adding more tutorial sessions on design, production, and emerging fields.  We’ve got some interesting surprises here to announce later in March but there will be opportunities to try new tools for building and prototyping exercise and nutrition games, and a set of standard briefings on the field, market, and funding opportunities in games for health.

* Additional conversational roundtables : Games for Health Conference has always been a great forum for networking and discussion, but we’re shifting more of our sessions to support the peer-to-peer conversations needed to foster increased collaborations and community building.

* Sunsetting : In our re-design we’ve decided to sunset our specific days on accessibility and medical modeling & simulation.  We plan to move LudicaMedica to a new event later in 2014, and we’ll feature the best content on learning and training with games in our main program.  Accessibility elements will also move to our roundtable sessions, and we’re looking at new ways to continue to support the needs, and cause of games accessibility.

* Games for Global Health : We’re planning our second year with a specific day on games for global health.  We want to continue to explore the opportunities for games for health to build on the explosive growth of mobile platforms in emerging markets.

* Out & About: Mobile Serious Games Day : This event will also return, but we’re looking to merge it with previous efforts exploring sensor games, to devote more time to the unique platforms, and opportunities being created by the growing wearable computing field.