Last week Flowy, a game designed to help sufferers of panic attacks, won funding as part of the Social Tech, Social Change initiative. Here's a more detailed look into how the game will work and the research that's going into it:
The game is designed for mobile (Android and iOS) and acts as an interface between the user and a set of breathing retraining exercises -- an anxiety management technique. "My sister and I have both experienced panic disorders and we started speaking about a breathing retraining app about six years ago," said Simon Fox, creative director of Playlab London, to Wired.co.uk. "It became a real project much more recently after I saw a little indie project called Asphyx [a game by Droqen] which asked its players to hold their breath. The idea of breath as a game mechanic seemed rich and the potential connection with breathing retraining was immediately apparent."
Flowy is designed to be played by those in the grips of a panic attack which means it can't be too complex -- when you suddenly feel like you can't breathe and might die, there's not so much attention capacity leftover for finicky gameplay mechanics or a convoluted narrative.
"As a result we decided to move away from producing a single longform game with a story, in favour of a series of minigames -- smaller, simpler interactions each designed to last between five and 15 breaths," said Fox. "A single play session will involve playing a few different novel games. The games translate a user's breath into a two-dimensional world where it is used to blow boats around, motivate kittens and power up robots."
The gameplay itself doesn't directly monitor breathing. Instead the player presses one button onscreen as they breathe in and another as they breathe out. Whether the technique proves effective is something which requires research on the part of the team and in conjunction with medical professionals.
Nick Grey, Clinical Director at CADAT (the Centre for Anxiety Disorders and Trauma at King's College) is supporting the development of Flowy and the game is being co-designed with clinicians at Southwark and Croydon IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) services. "Doing the investigation, which will tell us whether
Flowy is effective, is a multi-stage process," said Fox. "No one research project will give us a definitive answer so we have to do a lot of separate enquiries. Right now we're interviewing academics in the psychology department of Queen Mary's University London who will help us to design an effective experiment."
The connection with other mental health services is a vital part of Flowy. As Fox explains, the app will have the capacity to monitor usage and to signpost relevant services to the player if their condition worsens. It could also be used by medical professionals to get a picture of how severely someone with an anxiety disorder is being affected by panic attacks. "We're also speaking with mental health charities and a whole slew of NHS departments to make sure that what we're doing fits with their ideas about how to deliver genuine benefit," says Fox. "We want to build a partnership with the NHS which will allow us to perform our first trial with practitioners in their hospitals."
Flowy is currently in development and is intended for release on Google's Play store and via the Apple app store.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
