Jorge and Samuel are doing it wrong. Image courtesy of hdaniel

Health care is big business.  Just ask President Obama.  Even with our twenty-four hour news cycle being overrun with updates about the Iranian Elections or the latest round of tragic celebrity deaths, there is still almost daily coverage of the debate in Washington about the future of health care in America.  While there is a great deal of conflict over what exactly the cure is for our ailing health care system, it seems as though everyone agrees that something needs to be done to reign in the rate at which health care spending continues to grow.  If nothing changes the current estimates indicate that by 2017 health care expenses will top nearly $4.7 trillion dollars (nearly 20 percent of the Gross Domestic Product).

With all of that money floating around in the health care system it should not come as much of a shocker to learn that in the last 18 months exergames have generated nearly $2 Billion dollars in worldwide sales.  Despite our ever-expanding waist lines (or perhaps as a direct result of them) video game fans are flocking to fitness related video games like Wii Fit and EA SPORTS Active.

While the weight loss and general health benefits of fitness games may be fairly evident, there is also tremendous potential for them beyond those confines.  Nursing homes have started using Wii Fit as a way to help elderly patients improve their balance, flexibility, and endurance to prevent injuries, and now a new study from the Medical College of Georgia reveals that researchers there have successfully used Wii Fit to combat the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s Disease.

In the study 20 patients who were in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease spent an hour playing several of the games in Wii Sports three times a week.  Half way through the study the patients were showing signs of “significant improvements in rigidity, movement, fine motor skills and energy levels.”

The impact that seemed to surprise the researches the most, though, was the fact that most of the participants in the study lowered their depression levels to zero (studies suggest that 45% or more of Parkinson’s patients deal with depression).   While this may have been an unexpected benefit of using the Wii Fit from the researcher’s perspective, it really is not that hard to conceive.  Regardless of the cause, many people who are not physically fit often deal with depression over their situation, and the difficulty involved in starting a fitness program can make that depression much worse.  Simple exercises like the ones in Wii Sports are a great starting point to help someone believe that they can improve their overall health and set them on the path to long-term beneficial lifestyle changes.

Who knows?  With all the talk of spending more on preventative medicine in the future we may one day see doctors writing prescriptions for video game consoles.  If there continues to be research showing the kind of results that were seen in Georgia it is not outside the realm of possibility.