Abstract
Serious gaming (SG) is an emerging field that has a unique role in healthcare. With big data and continuous monitoring becoming a new trend in healthcare, SG is evolving faster in the medical field due to its fit into psychology and neuroscience. The SG multi-perspective and multi-functioning framework has the potential to add new dimensions to current treatment pathways and make a significant contribution to healthcare big data. SG data will add more perspective and value to clinical data both from psychological and neurological perspectives, which are still underplayed fields. SG research directed into intensive scientific and clinical pathways is critical for the next level of evolution of health data and health systems. This chapter addresses the importance of psychological data being implemented into health data and SG's role and its future in contributing to new treatment pathways for any disease condition.
TopBackground
Digital Health holds greater importance in the 21st century, due to the healthcare systems’ evolving technologies, advanced facilities to hold, store and analyse a large amount of data that can provide insight into any demographics. According to researchers at IBM Watson, “the average person is likely to generate more than 1 million gigabytes of health-related data in their lifetime” (University of Illinois Chicago, 2021). Today, we have the right technologies to handle these large data such as advanced server architectures, machine learning, neural network, and other artificial intelligence methodologies to predict, monitor, prognosis or treat any disease condition.
With all these advanced facilities and technologies, the healthcare industry still faces various challenges including regulatory frameworks to handle these large data, the quality of the data generated and methods to understand and distinguish between the necessary and junk data, appropriate use of data analysis to reach goals. Cloud computing platforms are storing these datasets and make them available for clinical applications for the benefit of patients (Zou et al., 2015). The computing platforms create models of biological functions with high predictable rates in diagnosis and disease prognosis (Hasselmo, 2001).
When focusing on the healthcare industry, it is important to understand different types of health data, and how important they are in screening, monitoring, and diagnosing different disease conditions. These big data, when categorised as per their importance, quality, and priority, contribute to both health economics and health informatics.
The healthcare system services aim not only to provide the right treatment plans but also to satisfy the unmet needs worldwide (Pereno & Eriksson, 2020). In this endeavour, they face challenges and emergencies to maintain a good level of care. Nonetheless, the new technologies have played a positive role in maintaining treatment procedures optimal with screening, monitoring, and diagnosing fast enough so that many patients benefit (Pereno & Eriksson, 2020). Healthcare needs to be sustainable, able to respond to population health needs, applying quality and responsibility of healthcare services that are used (Durrani, 2016). Although there are many issues regarding organisation and distribution of the services among individuals, several healthcare departments foster them into organisational designs, to tackle the challenges faced by the healthcare system (Durrani, 2016). The collaboration of such teams is important to establish communication between different stakeholders who use the technology.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Health Economics: Is an economical application to the field of health care and aims to maximize the goods and services from the health resources to effectively deliver quality of health in patients.
Digital Health: Is health information technology that supports clinical decisions in healthcare systems to improve diagnosis, treatment outcomes and delivery of health in patients.
Healthcare Data: Are data related to the health of a patient or population and include demographic characteristics, medical history, and any recorded information about a patient.
E-Health Apps: Are electronic health record software applications which are collecting health data from patients, and they communicate them to healthcare teams and professionals with the aim to exchange important clinical information about patients.
Healthcare Informatics: Refers to health information systems that are based on informative technological advances to promote benefits in healthcare systems.
Wearables: Are technologically advanced devices that can be worn by an individual and record important physiological data.
Serious Games: Are games designed especially for clinical populations, and they promote comprehensive and professional therapeutic models as game therapies.