Level up your health with gaming biomarkers

Is gaming the future for your Personal Health Companion™?

I’m experimenting with mixing up content with a combination of Notes and Posts because some content is better when it’s short. I’d love to hear from you if there’s more science-related gaming content you’d like to see!

Hello Scientist Gamer!

Markers are everywhere in our lives. No, I’m not talking about the ones used to colour between lines, though if you live with kids as I do, they too are everywhere¹. I’m talking about the information you can use to make an educated guess about something else.

Stock market trends can tell you about a potential recession. Blood pressure serves as an indicator for many conditions. Increased levels of certain proteins in your blood can signal potential liver malfunction.

When the markers tell you something about our bodies and health, they are called biomarkers. The official definition goes something like this²:

A defined characteristic that is measured as an indicator of normal biological processes, pathogenic processes, or responses to an exposure or intervention.

It’s a fancy way of saying, if we can measure it and we can connect it to something about your body, it’s a biomarker.

These biomarkers are important because they can tell us things that we might not be able to express in words. Sometimes, we don’t even notice things happening in our body unless it causes us pain or discomfort. By measuring and analyzing biomarkers, we can notice things that we might not have been able to before.

But many biomarkers require you to go to the doctor’s office with specialized equipment to be measured. Making time to go to the doctor in our increasingly busy lives is difficult in some cases and inaccessible in others.

So what if you could measure biomarkers without going to the doctor’s office where they might prick, cut, or otherwise maim you? Enter the world of digital biomarkers, where our day-to-day interactions with technology can be used as markers for health. And what better way to keep on top of our health while doing something we all love to do: gaming!

Walking simulators for health

Believe it or not, walking, and abnormalities in walking, can tell you a lot about your health³. Changes in how you walk can be signs of brain disorders or decreasing brain function.

There are plenty of devices, like smartwatches and even your phone, that can be used to measure walking. Everything from your pace and speed, and balance while walking can be measured and analyzed. With a few more sensors, things like pressure points on the sole of the foot while doing activities can be measured and recorded.

How cool would it be if a game like Pokemon Go incorporated some of these measurements, and alongside catching ‘em all, was measuring how you walk? Or as we track our daily activities on the phone, it was silently monitoring your health?

Voice and text-to-health

Changes to how we speak, from what we say and how we say it, have already been used as biomarkers for conditions like stroke and dementia. Features of our voice like pitch, tone, and speed, have been used as biomarkers for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. However, unlike walking, changes to our voice are harder to notice just by listening. Fortunately, machines are really good at listening for these changes.

The content of what we talk about (or write about) can be used as biomarkers for mental health⁴. I know there is some hesitancy around allowing AIs to access content but what if it was your own Personal Health Companion™ that you could train on your written and audio data?

I think it would be cool if YouTube or Twitch had an option for streamers to feed their stream data into their own Personal Health Companion™, so that they can monitor and stay on top of their health. Maybe Substack can implement a similar tool for writers!

Healthy brains for gaming

I’ve written in the past about gaming and its effects on brain function. Things like reaction time, planning, visual memory, and audio memory are all markers for how our brains are working. That means changes in any of these measures can indicate changes to brain function.

Could the games you play measure these kinds of things continuously and alert you if it’s starting to look different? What if alongside your kill ratio were health-related stats that could be used to take care of you? Even keystrokes might be able to tell you about changes to how your brain is working⁵.

Seeing is health

A modern camera or webcam is all you need (with help from software) to track things like eye movement, gaze, and visual attention, which have been used to diagnose and monitor conditions like autism, traumatic brain injury, and neurodegenerative diseases⁶.

With the rise of VR, eye movements can be tracked in a way that more closely matches real life movements. In the past, multiple cameras would have been required to track eye movements in 3D space. In a VR world, everything you look at can be tracked and measured with a single device.

Most of us spend time in front of a screen whether for work or for playing games and the potential for that data to be used to monitor our health is remarkable. Gaming, especially in a VR setting, has huge potential for acting as a silent data source for your Personal Health Companion™.

Moody gaming

Many of us wear some sort of smart watch, which tracks things like heart rate variability, blood oxygen, body temperature, etc. But there are other devices that can measure things like sweat production, which are all biomarkers for stress levels, anxiety, or depression.

What if the controller you held or the mouse that you use could measure some of those things? You would be able to track your mood during your gaming session, as long as you didn’t lose your sh!t and throw your controller or mouse at the monitor. But at that point, you probably didn’t need the controller to tell you what you were feeling anyway!

The Playstation 5 controllers were at one point rumoured to be able to measure things like heart rate and sweat production⁷, although it never came to fruition. Logitech, if you’re reading, how about a collaboration on your next-gen gaming mouse that incorporates temperature, sweat production, and blood oxygen sensors?

Total health through gaming

Each of the aspects of health I mentioned above can be useful on their own, but their real power becomes apparent when they are all combined for a total view of your health. Even more promising is the fact that all of these aspects of health can be measured or monitored while playing a video game, meaning you won’t need to take extra time out of your day to:

• Schedule time off work

• Commute to the doctor’s office

• Wait at the doctor’s office

Instead, while you pick up your preferred controller and wind down for the day, the games and devices you interact with can silently measure and record biomarker information. Your Personal Health Companion™ can then alert you of any abnormalities, which you can then take with you to the doctor’s office, with specific data regarding your body.

Is there a future where gaming can potentially save your life?

I certainly think so.

If you liked what you read, please consider giving this post a like!

1. Annoyingly, the dogs get at them too.

2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-024-01023-w#
This article is the inspiration for the ideas in this post. It doesn’t talk about gaming - that’s my spin on it, but it does talk about using digital biomarkers for health.

3. https://www.minervamedica.it/en/journals/europa-medicophysica/article.php?cod=R33Y2016N04A0560
This is one of many articles that talks about how walking can be analyzed to monitor different diseases.

4. https://karger.com/dib/article/4/3/99/99875/Evaluation-of-Speech-Based-Digital-Biomarkers
This article is a review and summary of recommendations for how speech could be used as biomarkers.

5. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/13/6/959
This article is about changes to smartphone keystrokes, but I think it could easily be adapted to measuring keystrokes during gaming.

6. https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/24/5/1572
This article talks about different digital biomarkers that can be used to predict neurodegenerative diseases, and one of those biomarkers is related to the eye.

7. https://www.hotnewhiphop.com/303915-sony-s-playstation-5-controller-could-monitor-your-heart-rate-and-sweat-report-news
To be honest, I’m not sure how reliable this rumour was at the time but it’s too bad they didn’t incorporate it.