Breathing Games: free games to breathe better
Children, clinicians and creators design free/libre games and breath controllers together, tested in hospitals.
Context
Living with asthma or cystic fibrosis means repeating breathing exercises every day, often experienced as a chore. Most health games are proprietary and disappear when their funding ends.
Intervention
In 2014, in Montreal, I co-founded Breathing Games, a health commons: games, code and hardware are released under free licences, so that anyone can reuse them. I organised game jams where children, clinicians, designers and engineers prototype together, and secured funding as principal investigator, including from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Fédération hospitalière de France.
Observed effects
- 38 co-creation events in five countries, including some twenty game jams
- A free/libre breath controller, made from EUR 30 to 70 of components, validated against spirometry with 158 children
- The game Asthma Heroes, translated into 13 languages by about a hundred volunteers
- Five clinical studies with hospital teams, notably at CHU Sainte-Justine
- 41,900 volunteer hours documented in my thesis; member of the WHO respiratory alliance (GARD) since 2018
- A co-creation method taken up by Terre des hommes
What it shows
A commons can bring together the people concerned, clinicians and researchers for ten years, with published and reusable results. It also taught me that a validated game does not spread on its own: a team and care partners must be planned from the start.
Where it could go next
Ten years have left what no new project has: a validated controller, a game that children and parents found acceptable, 13 languages reviewed by paediatricians, and hospital partners in Montreal, Paris and Palermo. The most promising path moves step by step: an Android and web version under a free licence, a host structure and a co-applicant clinical team in Switzerland or Quebec; then a game built into care pathways, for example when children return home after an asthma attack, and evaluated in practice.