Health Games By Us
This was our first HealthDesignBy.Us collaboration. Through a generous introduction by Guna Nadarajan, the Dean of the Stamps School of Art and Design, Joyce, a pediatric diabetes specialist at Mott Children's Hospital and co-director of Mott Mobile Technology for Enhancing Child Health (M2TECH), met Matthew Kenyon, an artist and professor specializing in code-based art/design who teaches popular classes in video game art and the new realm of creative apps. In our first curricular collaboration, we had students in Kenyon’s video game design class at the Stamps School create apps for kids with diabetes. Learn more here about the collaboration in the Stamps blog and our blog!
Gamifying Diabetes Clinic
Gamifying Diabetes is lead by HealthDesignBy.Us and GameStart, a local start-up in Ann Arbor that uses video games to teach technical and design concepts. The organizations connected when both Dr. Lee (view slides) and GameStart (view video) were speakers at TEDxDetroit 2014, and discovered a mutual interest in participatory design for education. They decided to explore combining GameStart's curricular approach of teaching kids to design their own games with the mission of HealthDesignBy.Us, to empower patients and caregivers to be experts and makers of their own health, to prototype and create an innovative new form of diabetes education.
They have conducted a number of workshops for teens with diabetes hosted at Mott Hospital, the JDRF Type 1 Conference, and the We #MakeHealthFest. The team has now secured a Patient Education Award from the University of Michigan Health System, and is working with the Mott Pediatric Diabetes Team to develop a type 1 diabetes educational curriculum delivered to children through a gaming platform. For updates about this project please sign up for our mailing list.
Check out this Storify about the collaboration and MedCity News article, Participatory Design Initiative Uses Gaming Collaboration to Cultivate Young Patient Experts!
Insaman Project
We created paper app prototypes for Mott Children's Hospital to encourage participatory design and creation for health. We passed them out in the pediatric diabetes clinic at Mott, and one of Dr. Lee's patients, "A", created the design for Insaman. Check out our blog post about "A" here.
He went home with more templates and sent us additional screens!
Margot Robert, a Stamps School of Art and Design student, then took up the charge to transform him into a digital video game. Meet the digital version of A's creation. This virtual superhero's mission is to help children with diabetes understand how to manage their blood glucose levels. And meet his friends the apple, the evil hamburger, and the boss pizza!
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