Bloody Gaming

All parents face challenges with their children. These vary from trying to get them to do their homework to staying up all night for fear that the once angelic child has turned to sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. Of course there can be other challenges too, such as when your child is born with a nasty disease and you just can’t make them understand how important it is to look after themselves.

Some children have the unfortunate ability to destroy their own pancreas, ending up with life long diabetes. This is a charming disease where you can’t regulate your own blood sugar leading to ulcers, nerve damage, and a strong possibility of slipping into a life threatening coma… the only way to avoid these problems is monitoring the sugar levels in the blood and regular injections of insulin. Unfortunately children are not very good at monitoring things and prefer to mess about and generally take life a lot less seriously than an adult would.

Luckily gaming might just be able to save the day and slap a little discipline into those care free tots.

A sneaky blood glucose meter company have come up with the cunning plan of making a meter that plugs straight into a DS or DS lite. They call it Didget. All you do is get some blood  into the Didget, look at the reading, and decide if you need a needle full of insulin in your side.

That’s the diabetic bit done and dusted, now here comes the gaming:

Plug the Didget into a DS and enter a password protected online world. The Didget tells the DS if regular daily testing has been carried out and if blood sugar levels have remained within optimum ranges. Regular testing earns points that can be used to purchase in game items, unlock mini-games and customize the Didget online world. Managing to keep blood glucose levels in the optimum range results in additional rewards.

In theory this virtual area is so good that children will want to keep their blood testing regular and thus keep up  a stream of fresh gaming content. It creates a unique virtual environment for children with diabetes where they can meet other children and game in a customisable landscape. Hopefully this will lead to well trained little diabetics who know how and when to test themselves letting Mummy and Daddy get on with other things… like playing the blood free Xbox.