Tuberculosis video game battles world's oldest disease

[Verox]

 

Project Sanitarium lets players battle tuberculosis, treating individual patients across the globe with limited resources.

It won Gold in the Healthcare category at this year's Serious Play Awards and third place in the Microsoft Azure Cloud Gaming Innovation Challenge – a particularly impressive achievement as the only student team taking part.

Tuberculosis kills someone every 20 seconds, according to the TB Alliance. At any moment, more than 11 million people are suffering from an active infection and the team hope that the game will increase awareness of this preventable tragedy.

The game was developed by Radication Games, a team of undergraduate students at Abertay University, as their third year group project. It uses a mathematical model developed by Professor Stephen Gillespie and Dr Ruth Bowness at the University of St Andrews.

As well as raising awareness of tuberculosis, the game helps test the mathematical model and provide data back to Professor Gillespie's infection research group.

John Brengman, student producer of Project Sanitarium, said: "The scale of the global tuberculosis pandemic is absolutely terrifying, but there's still very little awareness about this disease.

"You have as much chance of surviving Ebola without treatment as you do of surviving tuberculosis with treatment. We want to use games technology to help tackle this massive problem, through raising awareness and helping test the scientists' mathematical model."