Serious Games are games with an additional characterizing goal such as a learning effect, behavioural change or support for healthcare prevention and rehabilitation (Games for Health, abbr.: G4H).

Singular studies prove the benefit of G4H for specific application domains and the socio-economic potential of G4H is high. Nevertheless, good examples are rare, healthcare practitioners are not aware of existing solutions and there is a lack of education/training programs for the development of qualitative G4H and its integration/use in healthcare settings.

Based on that situation, both Serious Games experts and Healthcare practitioners of the Unite! network want to collaborate in the field of G4H, analyse existing approaches, identify requirements and best-practice examples, and finally elaborate a study program tackling those aspects as basis for an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master program. Collaborative work takes place online and on site, in the context of conferences and events in the G4H arena.

Unite! Games for Health envisions to prepare an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Program (EMJM) for the development and use of G4H for healthcare prevention, rehabilitation and training. The overall aim is to support the creation of qualitative G4H and its use in multiple healthcare settings – for the wealth of individuals and society. Hereby, a survey about the needs in concrete fields of healthcare and training for the medical staff towards the use of digital health and G4H (for therapy or among other diagnosis training) is essential to achieve the intended effects.

The target user group of the proposed EMJM program is twofold: on the one hand, students familiar with game development (e.g. computer science, games engineering, game design) will learn about the characteristics of G4H and the needs of healthcare practitioners. Vice versa, healthcare professionals with a background in health/health IT (e.g. medical technology or biomedical engineering) need to learn about the games und underlying development aspects in order to evaluate the quality of existing G4H (e.g. for decision-making whether to use/integrate a game in therapy or not) and/or to communicate with game developers w/r to the development of new games.

During the course of the seed fund initiative, a complete study program with teaching and learning measures, concrete modules (mandatory modules for all students in the first phase of the EMJM program), optional modules (specific for the different participating disciplines), and collaborative activities (e.g. practical courses for interdisciplinary teams) will be elaborated – as basis for an EMJM in G4H – and its alignment with existing study programs at the Unite universities.

On the practical side, a set of (available) serious games (based on local projects from the participating Unite! partners) will be identified and leveraged as “best practice” examples to show the potential of G4H (with realistic data) in selected application domains, and to serve as basis for a training and simulation platform designed to teach students in health(care), medical engineering and game development, as part of an EMJM program.