Serious Games: Building An App for Public Health Program

Background:  Over 300,000 mobile apps have been developed in the last three years. 10.9 billion downloads have been made and the most used mobile apps in the US are games, news, maps, social networking and music. Our interest was to explore, experiment and determine if a mobile app would be a valuable part of an overall marketing strategy for a public health program.

Program background:  Poison exposure is the 2nd leading cause of injury and death to children 0-5 years in the U.S. Nationally, nearly 80% of poison exposures occur in the home and 51% involve children under 5 years of age. However, parents are largely unaware of poisoning risks, often confused about poisoning prevention strategies and unaware of poison control centers as a resource. Data from the American Association of Poison Control Centers shows OTC and prescription medications accounting for the majority of exposures in children. In focus groups, parents report concern around colorful “pills” that can be mistaken for a treat.  To address this issue and raise awareness of poison exposure and poison control services, we developed  an online game, www.pillsvscandy.com”. The game has had nearly 24,000 visits and continues to attract over 300 players monthly. Consumer feedback about how people were playing the game led to the consideration of a mobile app to attempt to grow the audience even more. App sketching programed, including Balsamiq and Adobe Ideas were employed to develop the flow and architecture, as well as to determine what features were useful and engaging. A feature to add the national poison control hotline to your phone contacts, which connects to a local center in all 50 states, was added. The project attracted the attention of an university-led telemedecine department, which offered to code the app for use on an iPhone. The app was completed within 3 weeks in English, vetted in 10 days by Apple, and is currently in the App Store. A promotion and media strategy targeting bloggers, tech websites, and health reporters was put in place.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  The app, titled “Choose Your Poison” had 200 downloads in the first week and is currently at nearly 1,000 downloads.

Conclusions:  The novelty factor, this is the first app for poisoning prevention and service promotion, generated over 20 media mentions and articles on traditional and blogging sites. The resulting media attention provoked a small increase in calls to the hotline where consumers mentioned the game.

Implications for research and/or practice:  Gaming has enormous potential to help disseminate public health messages in a fun, engaging and creative way.