Mobile game Tamhattan supports healthy living

The University of Tampere has launched a new health entertainment project, which develops health promoting computer and mobile phone games for young people. The games bring the mobile youth together into a type of smart-mode-environment either at home or school. The starting point of the project is positive health education, where the youth’s knowledge on health increases while playing the game.

Tamhattan game involves the youth to lead the lives of Avatar-type characters in a 3D-environment, each of whom have some kind of a health or wellbeing problem to start off with. This might be connected for instance to poor sleeping pattern or posture, overweight caused by unhealthy diet or an addiction. If the game is played correctly, the lifestyle and health of the character improves throughout the game.     

The health game has been designed especially for entertaining young people between 12 and 16. According to its developers Tamhattan’s mobile sections utilise mobile phone features more variedly than any other game environment.

The health entertainment project is coordinated by the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Tampere. It is carried out together with the Department of Health Sciences at the University of Tampere, Departments of Human-centred Information Technology and Biomedical Technology at the Tampere University of Technology, Tampere Polytechnic and a number of businesses. The primary funder of the project is the National Technology Agency of Finland, Tekes.

The new project is also connected to the Japanese and American games industries, and Tamhattan, which will be translated into English, is intended to be tested internationally.

tervi.cs.uta.fi/
tervi.cs.uta.fi/tamhattan/