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Harnessing the Health Powers of Gaming 34
conq writes "BusinessWeek.com has a piece on how some new videogames are being designed with health-related applications in mind. From the article: 'A stopwatch and a tub of frigid ice water are the standard tools medical researchers use to test pain tolerance. How long can a person keep his arm submerged? In an unusual project, last year researchers at the University of Maryland's medical center used the arm-in-ice water test to evaluate a new video game called Free Dive. The researchers found that their subjects — 60 children, ranging in age from 5 to 12 — were able to keep an arm submerged for about 19 seconds on average. If, however, they simultaneously played Free Dive on a PC with their dry hand, the kids could tolerate an average of 86 seconds in the icy liquid — an increase of more than 400%.'" Juan Rey also writes to mention a report from financial news group Bloomberg, saying that Nintendo expects that their upcoming diet-related software for the Wii will succeed the way 'Brain Training' has done with DS.
Frog experiment (Score:1)
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What I'm getting at is, why ice water to test pain?
Because parents get upset when you set fire to their children. Or cut or stab them. Or whip, boil, fry, burn with acid, spindle, fold, or otherwise mutilate them. Temporary submergence of a limb in ice water is harmless.
Well, some of them do.
And they really object to the opposite test: determining your p
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Hmmm... (Score:2)
I can just see this being used for field pain relief: I need a DS and New Super Mario Brothers, stat!
At least, next time I stub my toe, I might use it as an excuse to play a video game. (I might also have more 'accidents' if I can use this argument.)
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Huh! (Score:1)
> University of Maryland's medical center used the arm-in-ice water test to evaluate a new video game
> called Free Dive.
Sounds more fun than the average game from Bullfrog, anyway...
I knew it! (Score:4, Funny)
Distraction (Score:2, Interesting)
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I would think the number of men that are able to watch chick flicks in order to earn brownie points with their wives would prove it's possible.
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I would think the number of men that are able to watch chick flicks in order to earn nookie points with their wives would prove it's possible.
Fixed
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Adrenaline &&/|| shock != distraction.
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Doctor told me to think about my favorite movie heroes and try to imagine their adventures at the times I was given painkillers (I ended up thinking about programming). It worked, after some time I could do without painkillers most of times.
And it still works (I'm 23 years old now), it's particulary useful when I'm at the dentist's because oral anastetics don't work well for me (unusua
Health benefits? (Score:4, Insightful)
Pain is how the body tells the mind that it needs to cut out what it's doing because it's likely to cause a problem. While some degree of pain tolerance is a good thing, sitting there and ignoring pain to do something fun is quite dangerous. If you pull a muscle in the first quarter of a game of football, you sit out the rest of the game to avoid making it worse. Of course it's good for the rest of your team during that game if you play anyway, ignoring the pain, but it's not good for you to do so. You, at the very least, risk a greater injury.
This is obviously a good thing for the game company, since they get their users to ignore their own well-being to play the game more, but it is far from a good thing for the user.
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Get a kidney stone and we'll talk (Score:2)
I spent a lot of time trying to find a decent dose of Percocet where I could be coherent but still deal with the p
Ice as Treatment for RSI pain (Score:2)
This tolerance test is just silly (Score:1, Insightful)
We could keep our arms submerged until they died. The pain slowly climbed and then hit a plateau and then fell off as the receptors in the limb shut down.
So after a minute or two of having my arm underwater, we all decided that the contest had now become pointless. I waited to get some level of motor coordination back and went about my business.
What the hell kind of pansies do they do this resear
Brain Trainig (Score:2)
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Not too new, worked on a 'game' against acrophobia (Score:2)
Besides distraction, there are a lot more applications for 'games' in treatments:
I worked on a proje