Homo ludens! Man wants to play. In 2008 the Nintendo Wii was introduced. An revolutionary product because you had to move skillfully to play the games. Instead of sitting down, eating pizza and shooting hundreds of virtual enemies (and that can be fun too) you had to tilt your arm, balance on your legs, jump or sway with your body. It was microtechnology that enabled the development of acceleration and gyro sensors so cheap and sensitive that it could be manufactured into a consumer product.
Serious gaming for health care with games specially developed for treatment of diseases will seriously improve so-called compliance, the endurance, discipline and enthusiasm with which patients stick to their therapies. No doubt about that. Medical professionals are positively reluctant and await further long-term investigations to improve the evidence base.
Together with game developers and medical professionals we have developed games for treatment of child balance due to e.g. a cerebral palsy, a tablet game for improving literacy of deaf children and an improved balance board game for children with Cerebral Palsy in rehab. This latter game was developed by Grendel Games and is nominated 3x for the Dutch Games Awards 2015 in the categories Applied Game Design, Best Co-production and Best Serious Game. See for an impression the Oath of the Gryphon trailer (in Dutch).
Miloland is a serious game for tablet developed by students of HKU (Utrecht School of Arts) for the Radboud University Nijmegen Chair of Augmentative and Alternative Communication occupied by Professor Hans van Balkom (www.ocleerstoel.nl). This chair is supported by the MILO Foundation, organisation for the support of people with a communication disorder and Royal Dutch Kentalis providing diagnostic, care and educational services to people who are deaf, hard of hearing or deafblind, as well as to people with severe speech/language impairment or autistic spectrum disorders accompanied by severe speech and language difficulties.