Hey everyone:
I'm interested personally and professionally in health promotion and disease prevention, as I said during the retreat and all. My latest thoughts on the issue were spent in trying to figure out how can we effectively generate behavioral changes in a given individual/population, without coercion of any source.
Today I came around with the notion of Technology as a powerful creator of new niches of culture and behavior. Take Twitter for instance. Or even Youtube; Facebook, cell phones. Even Personal Computers and the Internet! The behaviors people have nowadays, that we can observe anywhere, is linked with those advances. People sending text messages obsessively. Checking their emails every minute; engaging in virtual sex; whatever you can think of. 30-40 years ago this was unconceivable. And now the question is, how can we make use of technology to create new niches of culture and behavior that are favorable to Health?
Games are increasingly being looked upon as a scalable low-cost approach to building awareness and/or facilitating behavioral/attitudinal changes.
If you haven't already, you might want to check out some of the public health games listed on the Games For Change website.
http://www.gamesforchange.org/channels/health