Introduction: Medical people and game people have joined forces to create an unusual "medicine".
Games cross the medical field, and recently ushered in a rather heavy news.
The "Happy Horizon Planet Visual Training System" (hereinafter referred to as "Happy Horizon Planet" developed by Boke City successfully passed the approval of the State Drug Administration and obtained the Second Class MEDICAL device registration certificate. In the field of digital therapy in the game industry, this is also the "first certificate" in China, so it is of great significance.
Last year, the game gyro reported on the exploration of Gamified digital therapy in Poker City, and "Happy Horizon Planet" is one of the key projects, which mainly targets the problem of oblique amblyopia in children, hoping to better solve the patient's compliance problem through the good integration of medical function and gamification mechanism.
As a veteran game vendor that has been rooted in the game field for many years, gamification development is the ability to write into the genes, but when crossing the border to the serious medical field, they will of course face some problems and challenges.
Recently, the game Gyro interviewed Chen Hang, the medical consultant of Happy Horizon Planet, Huang He, the product producer, and the main Meikou Hengru, to talk about the content and development story of this gamified medical software, as well as the pain points and long-term value of its future promotion.
01
Established a project to improve adherence to the treatment of amblyopia
As a medical consultant, Chen Hang said that the birth mission of Happy Horizon Planet is to become a product that improves adherence to the treatment of oblique amblyopia.
He shared that amblyopia is a relatively common eye disease in children in the current society, and according to incomplete research statistics, the incidence of oblique amblyopia over three years old reaches 3%.
The best time to treat amblyopia is generally around the age of 6, and after more than 12 years of age, the efficacy will become very poor. If amblyopia is not treated in time, it may lead to permanently low vision in the child, and in adulthood, there will be a lack of stereoscopic vision. The biggest pain point of traditional amblyopia training is that the treatment process is "simple, mechanical, and boring", resulting in poor compliance of children, and the treatment effect cannot be guaranteed.
In the face of the problems of amblyopia treatment, the domestic medical field has also been seeking a breakthrough. Chen Hang said that at present, there are some medical device companies in China that try to introduce cooler hardware such as AR and VR to make children with amblyopia feel more fresh during treatment to promote the therapeutic effect.
But Happy Horizon Planet uses a completely different logic to solve this problem, not to do ritual in form, but to provide a more immersive gamified digital medical software.
In the view of medical person Chen Hang, the efficacy must be equal to the effective basic principle plus the correct use of the patient. This means that the scientific treatment plan, if the patient's compliance is poor, its treatment effect will inevitably be greatly reduced.
Starting from the characteristics of the target user, Chen Hang believes that the fun of the game has the advantage of attracting children's attention, if the mature and verified the treatment principle of amblyopia can be combined with gamified thinking, it may be able to better solve the problem of compliance, improve the effect of amblyopia training, and achieve practical medical value, and this idea has become an important guide for the development of "Happy Horizon Planet".
02
From 0 to 1, get the back of the domestic "first certificate"
After clarifying the product goals, the construction of the development team becomes the next step to be solved.
According to the sharing of producer Huang He, most of the developers of Happy Horizon Planet are transferred from traditional game development, so in the early stage, they still stayed in the development of traditional commercial games in terms of thinking experience. This project is completely different from the development idea of commercial games, and must first start from the verification of the effect of the therapy module, and then match the corresponding and non-contradictory gameplay for the module. But the team's initial understanding of medical expertise, especially in-depth knowledge of various therapeutic principles, can be said to be blank.
In order to solve the cognitive problems of the team, the company invited a professional medical team to customize a fairly strict training program - before the formal development, the development members need to go through several days of off-the-job classes, when the course is completed, they have to take the exam, and those who fail the exam need to re-learn.
Huang He said that with the development of products, the team members' knowledge and skills in ophthalmology can be said to be leaps and bounds, and the current small partners in the group can already help colleagues in other departments of the company to do free optometry, dispensing glasses, or judge whether he has potential strabismus symptoms. As a result, many people inside Poker today even joke that their team is an optometrist per capita.
The team's continuous and in-depth learning attitude towards ophthalmic knowledge has gradually made them a more professional development team in the direction of "game + medical".
In addition to the self-growth of the team, the development of the product has also been deeply involved by professional medical personnel such as Chen Hang, who will participate in the regular meeting of the development team every week, and will also help the development team solve various problems in the development process.
After the joint efforts of many parties and more than a year of repeated iterative development, Happy Horizon Planet has successfully realized 7 core functions.
For example, in the treatment of active amblyopia, Happy Horizon Planet allows children to participate more consciously in the treatment training through unique and interesting game content. As far as the current version is concerned, the development team has designed 5 Fantasy Continents, 16 featured maps, and up to 46 strange creatures in the game, and children will not feel bored when training for amblyopia therapy, which is equivalent to experiencing a wonderful otherworld adventure.
As a amblyopia treatment software, the presentation of visual effects can be said to be very critical. "Happy Horizon Planet" of the main Beauty Kou Hengru said that in order to ensure the therapeutic effect, the team focused on two aspects in the art design of the product: one is how to reasonably embed the principle of amblyopia treatment in the game; the other is how to make a style that is more popular with children.
Fine eye training
In Kou Hengru's view, the idea of putting the therapeutic effect of amblyopia first runs through the entire development process of the game. She shared that the current amblyopia treatment mainly includes the core principles of fine eye training, red light stimulation, black and white grating stimulation, and binocular separation. From the game design level, some content is easier to embed, such as red light stimulation, red light and shadow that appear widely in the game, such as special effects flying red bullets, flame bombs, etc., all to achieve this treatment.
Binocular Vision Training - Red and Blue Glasses 3D Mode
Compared with the red light stimulation, the addition of black and white gratings tests the team's thinking more. Due to the large number of elements embedded in the black and white grating in the treatment, after repeated discussions, the art team finally decided to embed a large area of grating elements in the UI prompts for monster warnings, the skill effects released by the big boss, and the cutscenes after each game to ensure adequate healing.
While ensuring the effect, in order to make the style that children prefer, the art team also looked at a large number of children's related cultural and entertainment works, went to the playground that children liked, and occasionally showed the art works to some children for practical research, and even the children of the team members also became the "evaluators" of the project art.
In addition to the advantages of product design, in terms of functionality, "Happy Horizon Planet" also has real-time monitoring of attention and AI intelligent error correction two major AI functions; in the doctor's end and parents' end, it has also launched a visual training report, so that parents can monitor the training effect of children in real time, for doctors, through these reports, you can also more clearly judge whether children in the rehabilitation treatment process, the indicators meet the standards, and adjust the personalized treatment plan of children's patients in a timely manner.
Visualize training reports
03
Gamification of medical software is not the same as a game
Huang He said that the clinical trial results of "Happy Horizon Planet" feedback is better than they expected, after a month of training, the vision of small patients with amblyopia generally increased by 1-2 lines, and the treatment effect was remarkable; and getting the certification of the State Drug Administration was an affirmation of the value of their medical products. As a traditional game developer, the heart that was hanging at the beginning of the blind step into this track was also able to land steadily.
Although it can bring tangible therapeutic value, some biased views of the outside world on this product, in Chen Hang's view, will affect its promotion and popularization to a certain extent in the future.
Unity3D production, beautiful cartoon graphics, fun and strange gameplay... All of this makes Happy Horizon Planet look like a normal game. It is precisely because of such a delicate gamification shell that "Happy Horizon Planet" has encountered some cognitive biases from the outside world.
When the game gyro asked about the challenges that may be faced in the future promotion of this product, Chen Hang also admitted that the biggest challenge may come from the fact that this product is developed by a team with a background in the game company.
Although Happy Horizon Planet is essentially a medical software, it has also obtained the corresponding medical device registration certificate. However, in the process of market promotion, when seeing the form of this product, not only some parents, but even some clinicians will wear colored glasses to look at, Chen Hang said helplessly.
He said that if Happy Horizon Planet came from a medical device company, there might not be so much controversy. For example, the problem of anti-addiction, for many medical device companies, anti-addiction can not be talked about, and almost no one will propose a medical device software whether it needs to engage in an anti-addiction system.
Such a topic could not have appeared in the field of medical software in the past. But for "Happy Horizon Planet", although its positioning is also medical device software, anti-addiction is also a problem that cannot be ignored. To this end, the development team has specially set up a one-click stop training function in the supporting parent-side APP, so that parents can accept this special medical software more unburdened.
Judging from the current situation of the market, Gyro Jun believes that such prejudices will not only exist in the "Happy Horizon Planet" product, but also in the future more gamified digital therapy products, and similar prejudices will still exist. From the perspective of value brought by the cross-border game, more "quantitative changes" may be needed to bring about "qualitative changes" in cognition.
04
Game cross-border medical treatment, need more affirmation and support
From product establishment to marketing, the birth of Happy Horizon Planet is not easy, and it also makes the outside world have a more symbolic understanding of the layout of Poker City in terms of "game +". From the perspective of the development status of domestic gamified digital therapy, Boke City can be said to be a company at the forefront of exploration in China.
According to Huang He, Poker City officially established a sustainable development office in early 2020, when the internal department was also very curious, after a brief understanding, many people think that this department is just doing public welfare, until the internal start of several "game +" direction projects, this recognition was gradually broken.
Despite this, there are not many developers who can make up their minds to join the "Game + Medical" track, and in the early days of the team building of Happy Horizon Planet, the project was not easy at the recruitment level due to doubts about the development value of the product. "No one is sure if this new direction will produce results, and not everyone wants to be a pioneer." Huang He said.
As one of the core personnel of game development, Kou Hengru mentioned that from their point of view, doing "Happy Horizon Planet" is not to enhance the company's reputation, or for what image, but really try to make a good gamified medical software, can really help patients, nothing more.
As a senior medical person who crossed over to the field of games, Chen Hang expressed optimism about the future of the "game + medical" project. In his view, in many areas of medical therapy, patient compliance is a major pain point. The advantages of gamification and even the in-depth study of users by game companies can not only help medical effects online, but also have many directions worth exploring offline in the future. For the successful development of "Happy Horizon Planet", Chen Hang believes that it will become an introduction to the birth of more similar products in the future.