Exergaming - Gaming for health: A bridge between real world and virtual communities

The urban lifestyle is hectic and information rich. A busy work pace and digital entertainment take time away from real world physical exercise, while lifestyle diseases increase globally. An aging population and diminishing resources for public healthcare cause pressure to move healthcare resources from treatment to prevention of illnesses. Exergaming, which is a term combining ldquoexerciserdquo and ldquogamingrdquo, has a lot of potential to provide various new service business opportunities for the entertainment and recreation as well as the healthcare sectors. We started with scenario work, consumer studies and exergame roadmapping and interviews with potential actors and created two prototype concepts, ldquofitness adventurerdquo and ldquofiguremeterrdquo in our project. At the beginning of our project, exergaming was not a very wellknown concept by the masses. The emerging success stories of Nintendo Wii and everyman GPS devices have shown that combining existing technologies in a novel way has already opened the exergame-related market and consumers are willing to use such services.