On April 18th, the "Gamified Digital Therapy Online Salon and Poker City", hosted by Boke City and undertaken by Arterial Network, was held online. This conference brings together opinion leaders, business executives, industry experts, etc. from the field of gaming and medical care to explore the application value of gamification digital therapy in the medical field and the possibility of in-depth cooperation between the medical field and the gamification industry in the future through keynote speeches and roundtable forums.
This is a grand event that witnesses the birth of the first certificate of digital therapy in the domestic game industry, and also an in-depth discussion on the possibility of the integration and development of gamified digital therapy and cognitive medicine under the "new normal".
Chen Hang, a medical consultant at Poker City, delivered a keynote speech entitled "Happy Horizon Planet - Breaking the Boredom and Starting a Fun and Wonderful Healing Journey", focusing on the core points of the research and development process of the "Happy Horizon Planet" product and the solution to the problem of compliance. Tan Yaxing, Consultant of Boke City Sustainable Development Strategy, Professor, Chief Physician and Doctoral Supervisor of Optometry Hospital Affiliated to Wenzhou Medical University, Wang Qinmei, Member of The Cornology Group of Ophthalmology Branch of Chinese Medical Association, Ying Li, Director of Zhejiang Nursing Society and Deputy General Manager of Hangzhou Jianhai Technology Co., Ltd., Qiu Fei, Founder and CEO of Evergreen Venture Capital, Hong Yang, Chairman of Frison Chen Medical Group, and Chen Hang, Medical Consultant of Boke City, attended the roundtable forum to discuss the opportunities and future development possibilities of gamified digital therapy in the field of medical and health.
Gamification has become an important means of digital therapy
It is no accident that Poker City won the first certificate of digital therapy in the game industry.
In fact, as early as 2019, Poker City began to try to combine games and medical treatment, and cooperated with the Smart City Research Center of Fudan University to explore the use of board games to achieve early screening of mild cognitive impairment. This study not only produced a paper and initially established a corresponding model, but also laid the foundation for the next step of exploration of Pok city.
Subsequently, The City of Pock formed a dedicated internal research team to explore how to help solve the problem of low patient compliance in the field of medical rehabilitation through the interactive and fun nature of the game. After thinking and combing through, Polk focused on two groups, one old and one small. In 2021, Pock City launched a gamified digital therapy strategy and cooperated with the medical industry, hoping to explore gamified digital therapy in terms of "game diagnosis, game treatment, game helper, game doctor assistant".
This strategy has led to the development of two pipelines, one of which is the certified "Happy Horizon Planet" strabismus amblyopia training and treatment system, which is developed in cooperation with the well-known ophthalmology institution Colevision, Shanghai's first municipal public rehabilitation hospital, Tongji University Affiliated Yangzhi Rehabilitation Hospital (Shanghai Sunshine Rehabilitation Center), MicroMain and a number of ophthalmologists. Another pipeline is the "Customized Link Memory Game" cooperated by Pok city and Yangzhi Rehabilitation Hospital affiliated to Tongji University, which is mainly used in the rehabilitation training of cognitive impairment in the elderly and young.
Combined with the exploration of using games to empower other fields, Poker City proposed an upgraded "Game +" strategic plan, exploring the combination of Poker City's core game design capabilities with the needs of different industries in society, empowering social issues with games, and improving the experience and efficiency of participants. In addition to the core position of "game + medical", it also includes "game + education", "game + public welfare", "game + popular science" and "game + culture" and other directions.
Based on the previous precipitation, Poker City has given three goals to "gaming + medical". First of all, Poker City hopes to use games to empower and reshape the medical service ecosystem and improve the efficiency and accessibility of medical services: with the core capabilities of game interaction, it can achieve "cost reduction and efficiency" of medical services, improve the efficiency of medical services, and make medical services more accessible.
Second, Pock City wants to be patient-centric and innovate digital patient delivery methods and experiences. Most importantly, through gamified and innovative means to explore and integrate the personalized, diverse and fragmented health needs of patients, to provide practical and feasible landing solutions.
Finally, Boke City hopes to promote the integration of medical services and digital technology with a comprehensive resource layout, that is, to build a new digital medical service method by linking professional medical resources and cultivating cross-border talents for medical treatment and digitalization, so as to realize the value innovation of medical services.
As a first attempt to combine gaming and medical treatment, Pock City is more focused on using the stickiness of the content itself to users to improve compliance in treatment. The development of strabismus amblyopia treatment field is because the treatment itself has a clear treatment principle and method, and there are also prominent adherence pain points, which is one of the reasons why Poker City chose to enter from this field.
"However, the game is more of an entertainment factor, as long as it is fun. For SaMD (Medical Device Software), more attention needs to be paid to the core principles section. For example, what exactly plays the strongest therapeutic role in the whole presentation process, and which is useless? There needs to be corresponding scientific arguments, research results and clinical applications. In addition, it is also necessary to pay attention to whether there are corresponding adverse reactions or even malignant medical accidents during the use of the product. This part is a very big difference", Chen Hang, medical consultant of the Digital Therapy system of Poker City Strabismus Amblyopia Treatment System, Master of Optometry Medicine of Wenzhou Medical University, and founder of The Kelai Vision Center, also mentioned that there are still some essential differences between SaMD and the game.
It is precisely because of the accumulation of previous experience and the reverence for the medical industry, Poker City has set up a team different from normal game development for "game + medical", and introduced experts from the external medical industry, and combined the mechanism of medical exploration and truth-seeking in daily management, and reached cooperation with multiple medical research institutes, hospitals and schools with an open and rigorous attitude, so that the two industries have achieved a relatively deep integration. Game companies that do not have the corresponding medical research experience and accumulation still need time to catch up.
At this stage, the rehabilitation treatment of domestic children's strabismus is mostly based on beads, prickly spots, and light stimulation, and the treatment process is long and boring, even if many medical device manufacturers have introduced more fresh hardware, it is still difficult for children to adhere to repeated content training for up to 3-6 months, or perfunctory in the treatment process, unable to achieve the therapeutic effect. Since strabismus amblyopia requires early intervention, once the treatment is not effective, it will lead to a lifelong eye disease. This requires the complete attention of parents during the treatment process, which requires a lot of time and effort for parents with busy work.
Emphasis is placed on improved adherence and personalized precision treatment
Professor, Chief Physician and Doctoral Supervisor Wang Qinmei, member of the Cornology Group of the Ophthalmology Branch of the Chinese Medical Association, said: "Congratulations to Poker City's Happy Horizon Planet software for being approved by the NMPA as the first gamified AI treatment software. Before, including parents, we were very resistant to the game, afraid of wasting time and abandoning learning. And getting approved for digital therapies that combine gaming and medical treatment is a very groundbreaking thing. With the participation of professional doctors, the child achieves the purpose of treatment while playing. ”
"Happy Horizon Planet" strabismus amblyopia treatment system is based on a variety of internationally certified training methods, integrating CAM stimulation, red light stimulation, fine eye training and other light stimulation therapies, at the same time, combined with red and blue binocular vision to achieve three-level functional training, and through simple operation, interesting gamification design, effectively improve the child's compliance, help children complete strabismus rehabilitation training in the process of playing.
The therapy also has an embedded evaluation system that can assess the near vision of the amblyopia eye, so as to match the optimal training difficulty and achieve the goal of refinement and personalization. At the same time, the software's home vision assessment and follow-up rehabilitation process also improve the efficiency and accessibility of medical services.
Most importantly, the therapy has real-time attention monitoring and AI intelligent error correction. With the now-popular front-facing cameras of tablets and smartphones, the therapy continuously detects the child's posture during treatment and whether elements of rehabilitation, such as proper wearing of the eye mask, are available. Once an abnormality is found, treatment is suspended and prompted until the child is in the correct position again and the blindfold is worn.
The Strabismus Amblyopia Treatment System provides a comprehensive parental management function
In addition, the therapy also has a separate parent-side APP. The whole treatment process will generate a detailed statistical report and push it to the parents, which not only includes the training intensity, but also includes the statistics of the child's abnormal attention monitoring. With such intelligent assistants, parents can achieve a training process of accurate personality. At the same time, for children with good training effects, parents can slightly reduce their attention and reduce their burden.
For compliance, Chen Hang shared: "First of all, the definition we gave to "Happy Horizon Planet" is a training method that children prefer. We put improving patient compliance at the forefront, why? Because the track that "Happy Horizon Planet" is currently aimed at is actually a track for children's oblique and amblyopia rehabilitation. Rehabilitation of amblyopia It is a long-term process, and the efficacy must actually be equal to the effective basic principle plus the use of the patient. So for patient compliance, Happy Horizon Planet has done a lot of work.
For the team at Poker City, we've been at the forefront of studying user behavior, so we've created the entire product for patient compliance issues. This includes engaging game settings, real-time monitoring of attention, and AI error correction. We implanted a lot of digital product concepts and designed the entire training from a child's point of view. At the same time, in the whole process of rehabilitation training, whether from the parent end or the doctor's end, the form of treatment results is more visualized, so that medical workers can adjust the personalized treatment plan for patients in time. ”
At the meeting, Ye Weizhong, founding partner of Daohe Technology Investment, said: "We pay special attention to cross-border innovation in game-related fields, including technological innovation in game ecology and empowering other industries with game thinking. I feel that the Poker City team has done a lot of innovative valuable exploration and work in this direction. ”
Qiu Jialin, founder of MicroMain, said: "This is an important exploration of the game industry in the field of medical health, Micro Pulse and Poker City have been exploring the application of gamified digital therapy in the field of specialty since last year, and look forward to continuing to do healthy things together in the future." ”
Gao Yunlong, CEO of Zhilan Health, said: "Congratulations to Poker City's "Happy Horizon Planet" for obtaining the approval of the Food and Drug Administration, becoming China's first medical gamification AI software approved for listing, Zhilan Health, as a CDMO and full-process service enterprise in the field of digital therapy, is happy to witness such a major happy event in the industry. ”
From the perspective of serious medical treatment, the game still needs further efforts to further integrate with medical treatment to achieve the deep integration of the two industries. The approval of Poker City Gamification Therapy this time not only represents a beneficial attempt in the domestic game industry, but also brings excellent references to both the game industry and the medical industry - more research on the role of games on medical treatment may be carried out, more games or gamification methods will also be applied to the medical process; for the medical industry, it is also a good attempt to provide some popular ways outside of the serious medical ontology.