Stroke experts in the United Kingdom from Newcastle University have been working with Limbs Alive to create action-focused games that help patients overcome physical side effects through therapeutic gameplay that can be used at home. Limbs Alive was founded by Professor Janet Eyre and occupational therapist Janice Pearse in partnership with Newcastle University and The Newcastle upon Tyne NHS Hospitals Foundation Trust.

The Games for Health Project announced today that Jay Walker, CEO of TEDMED (another annual conference on the future of health and medicine) will deliver the closing keynote speech at the eighth annual Games for Health Conference in Boston, June 12-14. Of course, you already knew this if you listened to Episode 2 of the Super Podcast Action Committee, which featured a lengthy interview with Ben Sawyer from the Games for Health Project...

This week on the podcast we talk with Ben Sawyer, Project Director for Games for Health. Ben gives us a preview of what the event will offer next month and even talks a little bit about the impact of gamification on our privacy.

Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight delve into the fine print of Microsoft's recently announced $99 Xbox 360 and detail why it's not really a good deal for anyone. They also discuss the sorry state of the big three console makers.

While children play at the Shirley G. Moore Laboratory School their every move is being recorded by five Kinect motion sensors tucked away in the corners of the room. No, this isn't some clever new security system or some Orwellian plot by school administrators; the Microsoft motion sensing game technology for Xbox 360 and PC is being used to detect autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in young children.

Children with cerebral palsy (CP) can greatly benefit from playing "active play" video games - as opposed to the kind that don't require any kind of physical activity. According to researchers from Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital and the University of Toronto.

Researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA worked together to create an online gaming system that uses players to help diagnose malaria. In the game, players distinguish malaria-infected red blood cells from healthy red blood cells by viewing digital images obtained from microscopes.

The President's Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition hopes to get inactive kids away from the sedentary lifestyle and into one where using active video games is a common occurrence. The President's Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition (PCFSN), U.S.

This year's Games for Change Festival is set for June 18-20 in New York City. The event dedicated to promoting social change through video games will offer plenty of activities this year including case studies, roundtables, lectures, demos, and more. Featured speakers for this year's event include Jane McGonigal, New York Times bestselling author (Grand Theft Childhood) and co-founder of SuperBetter Labs; leading researcher, Dr.

Registration is open for the eighth annual Games for Health Conference, set to take place June 12-14 at the Hyatt Harboside Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. Organizers of the event have scheduled over 80 talks covering various topics related to merging video games and video game technologies with health and healthcare.

For the first time, The AbleGamers Foundation will have a booth at a public gaming event. The organization dedicated to supporting technology and games that offer accessibility to the disabled will be at the Penny Arcade Expo East (PAX-E 2012). The nonprofit will have a booth on the main floor of the Expo (North Hallway) displaying some of the best technologies available to those with disabilities who want to get into gaming.

Epic Games has inked a long-term deal with Virtual Heroes, a division of Applied Research Associates, Inc. (ARA). The Virtual Heroes Division of Applied Research Associates creates collaborative interactive learning solutions for healthcare, federal systems, and corporate training markets. Virtual Heroes will use Unreal Engine technology to create interactive educational and training software to be used by various U.S. government departments and agencies.

Dan Porter, CEO of OMGPOP, will be a featured speaker at the 2012 Gamification Summit in San Francisco (June 19 – 21). Porter will talk about the techniques his company used to make their ultra popular Pictionary-like drawing game, Draw Something, so successful among users.

The AbleGamers Foundation has given the 2011 Accessible Mainstream Game of the Year Award to Star Wars: the Old Republic. The charity dedicated to encouraging accessibility of games for players with disabilities says that Star Wars: The Old Republic deserved this year's award because it provided a lot of options for players.

Oh, you wacky scientists.  What are you up to now?

Well, Informatics research scientists at the University of California, Irvine have built an Outrun arcade cabinet that can be driven on the road.  For real.

Phaedra Boinodiris, serious games program manager at IBM, writes a guest editorial on Forbes exploring the way that games can be used to energize and enhance other things besides research projects. The point of her editorial is that researchers have been helped greatly by games created to solve problems that take advantage of "collective intelligence," and global participation.

A teen from Cupertino, California has won a $100,000 science prize for research on cancer stem cells and two teens from Oak Ridge, Tennessee won the top team honor for using a video game to conduct research on the science of walking to benefit amputees who rely on prosthetics. The 17-year-old, Angela Zhang, won the top honors at the Siemens Foundation’s annual high school science competition. The top team prize went to two students from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for their research using gaming technology to analyze motion while walking.

While those who don't know anything at all about video games are quick to use them as an excuse for many of society’s ills (crime, violence, obesity, attention deficit and a myriad of psychological disorders), now everyone thinks they are bad. In fact a growing number of academics see the value in video games as teaching aids. For example, a Yale professor is trying to use them to teach sex education.

Parents with children suffering from amblyopia (referred to by some as "Lazy Eye") frequently have trouble with kids refusing to do vision correction exercises. Since these exercises are important to correcting this type of vision problem, parents need tools to make the activity more fun and engaging for youngsters. Correction of amblyopia typically involves some sort of repetitive coordinative exercise, such as navigating a maze on paper, drawing lines on paper, etc. The problem is that some kids find these activities to be tedious and unchallenging.

Red Hill Studios is using the motion technology found in the Xbox 360 and Wii consoles to help people with Parkinson's disease improve their gait and balance. Researchers have used the technology to help stroke victims in a similar fashion, so aiming the technology at other afflictions makes perfect sense. Red Hill is collaborating with the UCSF School of Nursing to develop the game.

A new video game called Focus Pocus hopes to help children suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) by having them control their game characters with their brain waves through 12 mini-games. The game incorporates a real-time electroencephalography (commonly referred to as EEG, or defined as "recording electrical activity along the scalp") headset to measure and improve impulse control, memory, attention and relaxation in children.

New research published online in the Journal of Critical Care from Johns Hopkins researchers claims that video games are a good supplement to traditional physical therapy for patients in intensive care units (ICU).

Video game developer Brain Plasticity is seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a cognitive training game because it wants to market the game as a therapeutic drug. The company has been working on a game to help people who suffer from schizophrenia improve attention and memory deficits that are often associated with the disorder. The company plans to conduct a study with 150 participants at 15 sites across the country. Participants will play the game for one hour, five times a week over a period of six months.

Researchers at the University of Utah have developed a motion-controlled game that helps children with cancer cope with their illness by promoting good mental health and physical fitness. The game, which was developed by chemistry professor Grzegorz Bulaj, is called PE Interactive (PE stands for "patient empowerment").

A research paper published Sunday by the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology details how the online game Foldit successfully mapped a protein-cutting enzyme from a particular AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys. This enzyme apparently helps the virus spread and to counteract it, its exact molecular structure had to be mapped. This task had been impossible until crowd sourcing came along.

A new research project from the University of the Fraser Valley (Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada) uses video games to help test the motor skills of children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (or FASD). UFV has been running the after-school program, FAST Club, for children with FASD for the past three years. But this year brings a new element to the program - video games. The after-school video game program called BrainGamers Club helps children with FASD work on their motor skills and gaming skills, and measures whether the impact of these activities cross over into other areas.

A new survey commissioned by PopCap Games and conducted by University of Massachusetts Amherst psychology researcher Susan K. Whitbourne, Ph.D. that compared the gaming habits of older and younger players who play Bejeweled Blitz regularly felt mentally "sharper." The findings of the survey of 10,000 U.S. adults were presented at the American Psychological Association's (APA) annual convention in Washington D.C. The survey investigated the feasibility of Bejeweled Blitz as a cognitive training tool for older adults.

Dr. Maureen Becker, director of clinical education for the Willowbrook college’s Physical Therapy Doctoral Program, is using three New York City-area students (Rachel Pollack of Willowbrook, Emily Cochran of Grasmere and Shirley Coffey of Brooklyn) — to study the most effective ways in which young people can get a real-world workout with Nintendo's Wii Fit. The study began in June, and focuses mainly on tween girls, because, Dr. Becker says, girls tend to have a higher obesity rate than boys in the same age range.

Organizers of the Gamification Summit announced this morning that they have finalized the agenda and speaker program for the September 15-16 conference occurring in New York City. That agenda includes keynotes, featured talks, design intensives, panels, and workshops that (they hope) teach and inform attendees on the subject. GSummit promises to bring together experts from advertising, healthcare, education, government, media, e-commerce, startups and academia to share knowledge and improve engagement with consumers and employees by using gamification techniques.

A new report from The Behemoth development blog brings news of a new title update for Castle Crashers on Xbox Live Arcade, along with some great news for the Keep A Breast Foundation. First, The Behemoth is offering the Pink Knight DLC for Xbox Live Arcade for free and for every time it is downloaded the developer will give $1 to the Keep A Breast Foundation - until it hits the 50,000 download mark.

Researchers at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney, Australia, are building a virtual heart to study the fatal effects that electrical disturbances can have on patients. This virtual heart, a real-time computer simulator, will allow medical researchers to study how structural changes to the body's most vital organ can interfere with its beating.