Clinical Talks: Playing your way to healthy life
On October 15, it’s our great pleasure to host Professor Emma Lundberg once again. This time she will focus her Talk on her innovative company Mindforce GameLab. With the Fig platform, patients can via gamification transform into “playtients”, people with medical conditions who enjoy playing games with a purpose to establish healthy habits. Fig guides you on the journey to better health, including improved behavioral administration of medicals for intended and sustainable use.
Emma is a Professor in cell biology proteomics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and Director of the Cell Atlas, part of the Human Protein Atlas program. She spent two and half sabbatical years as visiting Associate Professor at Stanford School of Medicine and the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub. In the interface between bioimaging, proteomics and artificial intelligence her research aims to define the spatiotemporal organization of the human proteome at a subcellular level, with the goal to understand how variations and deviations in protein expression patterns can contribute to cellular function and disease.
She also has a keen interest, passion, and fascination in the use of gaming for science and health applications. This led Emma to start her own company in 2017, Skellefteå based Mindforce Game Lab, with the goal to unleash the powerful potential gamification could offer medical healthcare. Simply phrased, medicines will not work if people do not take them. Despite this, only every other person takes their medication as prescribed. This is a fundamental challenge for treating many chronic diseases, in terms of patient outcomes, as well as the overall burden on healthcare systems. Although there are products that help patients with extrinsic motivations, such as reminders and notifications, Mindforce Game Lab focuses on intrinsic motivations; designing games that build in feelings of companionship, belonging and purpose. Patients learn how healthy routines, such as sleeping well, eating well, exercising regularly, and adhering to prescribed medication, can improve feelings of well-being. This builds an inner driving force to want to change behaviour and to maintain a healthy lifestyle. In late 2020 Mindforce Game Lab joined the AstraZeneca BioVentureHub and relocated the development team to Gothenburg.
After our recent planning hiatus, we now have the great pleasure to announce that “Clinical Talks” has been renewed for yet another exciting, innovative, and enlightening season. This season will focus on sustainable innovations within Life Sciences, that have the potential to contribute to a better climate friendly future for our future generations. Also new this year is that the seminar is co-organized in a collaboration between SciLifeLab and KI Innovations.