Oct 1, 2015 4 min read

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Tuberculosis is still a major health threat in the United States and kills someone every 20 seconds. Each year, about 9 to 14 million people are infected with TB. In addition, foreign-born individuals are 11 times more likely to contract the disease. The condition is highly contagious and spreads when individuals with the disease sneeze, cough, sing or speak, transmitting the illness to those around them through the air.

If the disease goes untreated, it can be fatal. However, there are several treatment strategies that can be adopted, such as treating a latent TB infection and using drugs that are not resistant to TB. The most common drugs used in treatment include isoniazid (INH), rifampin (RIF) and rifapentine (RPT). Further, prevention of the disease through containment helps to halt continued contamination. And one particularly interesting tactic, like something out of a sci-fi film, is a new video game that offers a high tech solution to this age-old disease.

Recently, a group of Abertay University students and University of St Andrews scientists who call themselves Radication Games developed a new video game under the auspices of Project Sanitarium and programmed the game to fight TB. The game allows users throughout the world to fight TB using a limited amount of resources. The primary objective of the game is to raise awareness about TB to fight its spread.

”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.” – John Brengman, student producer of Project Sanitarium

The game uses a mathematical algorithm in the background to predict human behavior and what will occur with the spread of disease in the game. Worldwide, there is not enough medication to fight TB or perhaps other diseases. Using the algorithm to test what occurs during the game provides useful information about disease infectivity that can be studied.

In the future, this and other digital solutions could offer a viable way of containing and eliminating the TB threat worldwide. The information gathered from the game will be shared with public health stakeholders in order to posit solutions for managing worldwide outbreaks of disease.

The video game won a gold award in the healthcare category at the 2015 Serious Play Awards and third place in the Microsoft Azure Cloud Gaming Innovation Challenge. This impressive achievement is nothing compared to the overall objective of the project.

Using data to fight disease will become more commonplace as healthcare organizations and public health departments continue to develop the technological framework required. This TB video game represents just one way this is accomplished.