What you’ll get out of this episode
Listen in as host Tim Fitzpatrick chats with Dr. Lynn Fiellin about her path to founding Playbl, the Yale spin-out company harnessing the power of play to enable healthier and better lives for adolescents. We learn what tools, principles, and earned wisdom Dr. Fiellin and her teams have developed over the past 13 years building serious games. From 30-page playbooks to randomized controlled trial designs for hundreds of teens, this is a must-listen for anyone interested in the use of video games for health education and behavior change at scale.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How Lynn landed her first grant from NIH in 2009 to begin building her first games
- Playbl has now created games for ages 10 – 20 years old between topics ranging from health promotion, vaping and smoking awareness, and mental health awareness, to preventing opioid misuse and addiction.
- The importance of scientific process and study design in the development of Dr. Fiellin’s games, with 12-18 months from initial design through piloting and evaluation before its ready for randomized study.
- How an early partnership with Shell Games enabled Lynn and her team to combine best in class game development with academic research to get these games off the ground, and led to the creation of a “Games Playbook” to align gaming and research teams on a set of common goals, outcomes, and milestones.
- How Lynn and Playbl think about studying impact at various time points, and the durability of those results in the adolescent population
- PlaySmart, Playbl’s latest game for kids ages 16 to 19, that was funded by NIH’s HEAL initiative and aims to address mental health and opioid misuse (see game).
- Playbl has long targeted K12 education settings due to the demand of parents and educators looking for these types of solutions, especially during the pandemic. Now, Playbl is exploring working with major children’s hospitals to provide health education content in clinical settings as kids are sitting in waiting rooms.
- Playbl has now recorded upwards of 420,000 logins for their educational games.
Final Frontier – 5 Questions in 50 Seconds
- Top Challenge: System-level support and standardization in health education, School funding
- Top Opportunity: Serious games for skills development in adolescent health and well-being
- Tech Trend You’re Following: ChatGPT, AI
- Top Media Recs: “What’s The Point of Your 20s?” By Emma Goldberg (New York Times)
- Healthcare / Tech Leader(s) You’re Following: Dr. Vivek Murthy, US Surgeon General
Watch
Listen
Quotables
“Finding Kids where they are, and where they wanna be is really the ticket.” @LFiellen #PlayBl on Ep 35 @T-Minus10 w/ @trfitzpatrick
“We design our efficacy trials in the way that we would design any other efficacy trials. The only difference is that the delivery vehicle is a video game. So, our current study is enrolling 532 kids ages 16 – 19, at 10 schools around Connecticut. We will follow them for 12 months, and they are essentially assigned to play our Play Smart game, which again focuses on Mental Health and opioid misuse, or a set of control games. We then collect data from all of them and baseline them 6 weeks at the end of gameplay, and 3, 6, and 12 months. This allows us to really say that we have accomplished something and that we accomplished what we set out to accomplish.” @LFiellen #PlayBl on Ep 35 @T-Minus10 w/ @trfitzpatrick
Recommended Resources
- PlayBl
- Play2PREVENT Lab – Yale
- A Yale doctor is using a video game to fight the opioid crisis – WaPo
- SeriousGames@Google: PlayForward: Using Games to Improve Adolescent Health (YT)
- Protecting Youth Mental Health – US Surgeon General
Join the Conversation
“What an amazing celebration! Congratulations to the brilliant Bernice Pescosolido and the Indianapolis Colts
for this ground-breaking work by launching The Irsay Institute to address stigma related to mental health. The play2PREVENT Lab at Yale is thrilled to be partnering w you and Bring Change to Mind (BC2M)!
Yale University School of Medicine Yale School of Public Health Yale Child Study Center” @Lynn Fiellen on LinkedIn
“ “We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.”
My honor to give my Professorial Medical Grand Rounds last week, sharing the past 20 years of my career: down the research road and the other roads I have had the opportunity to travel.
Thank you to my teams and partners at the play2PREVENT Lab at Yale, Yale University School of Medicine, Yale University, Yale Department of Internal Medicine, Yale New Haven Hospital, and others.
I am so proud of this career and the work we have done together.” @Lynn Fiellen on LinkedIn
About Your Host
Tim Fitzpatrick is the CEO of IKONA Health, a company using neurobiology and immersive technology to improve how patients learn about their care and treatment options. Tim co-founded IKONA based on his own patient experiences while serving in the US Navy and now in the VA health system. He has served as Principal Investigator on multiple federal research grants, has co-authored papers on learning science, VR, and mental health in the age of COVID-19, and has partnered with top healthcare investors and institutions including the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, National Artificial Intelligence Institute, StartUp Health, On Deck, FundRx, MATTER and NVIDIA.
Sponsored by: IKONA Health
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