The Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) Innovation Congress 2007 in Boston brings together leaders from industry, academia, and government to collaborate and explore ways in which technology innovations are driving change in healthcare. On November 14, 2007, the conference will also feature eight game development students from Champlain College and the director of Champlain's Emergent Media Center, who will demonstrate games that deal with medicine, pandemics and exercise.

"Today's college students have grown up using games for entertainment and this Digitally Native generation is driving the medium of games beyond entertainment as a tool to learn, collaborate and communicate," said Ann DeMarle, director of the Emergent Media Center at Champlain College. "It's apt that a group of our students continues to field invitations to showcase game solutions for businesses and in this case, the medical community of Boston."

Champlain College was invited to the conference because of its work in the serious game development arena. Two of the games on display are GameLets created by Champlain College students during a recent international learning conference in Orlando, where they were part of fast-paced game development experiment that showcased the value of serious games for business training and learning. One of the student-created games involves how organizations would handle the threat of a pandemic.

In addition, students will demonstrate a video game that some surgeons are using to help "warm up" before surgery, highlighting a study that concluded that surgeons who played video games for at least three hours a week were 27 percent faster and made 37 percent fewer mistakes than surgeons who did not play video games. Other games to be demonstrated include "Trauma Center: Second Opinion," played on the Wii, and "ReMission" for children with cancer.

Game development student Wesley Knee will be part of the Boston contingent, after being part of the game team at the Orlando conference. "People in game development majors don't have to end up making games only for X-Box or PlayStation," he said. "There's a bigger push these days for using games beyond entertainment." Knee will be joined by fellow students Katherine Baxter, Iain Bissett, Jennifer Brusco, Oscar Diaz Timothy Hamel, Anthony Libera and Lauren Nishikawa.

The Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) is a community of highly motivated collaborators who meet to learn from each other and identify gaps in healthcare where known and emerging technologies could solve clinical problems. Founding institutions include Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham & Women's Hospital and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Posted 11/12/07