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You love to play games on your pc, tablet or phone. And yes, you want to stay fit and healthy with help from your wearables. But you also want to stay in touch with your family and friends at the same time ….  

Hard to combine this all? At EIT Digital, we recognise these challenges and have given Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and it’s partners (Synergetics, Zuidzorg, Telecom Italia, CNR, Trento Rise), the opportunity to develop ‘GameBus’!  GameBus is an app that encourages families and friends to stay active socially, mentally and physically through a personalised gaming experience. GameBus is there to support you to connect more with your loved ones. 

Time pressure on modern families is high and making time to spend together and reconnect can be very rewarding. So, right in time for the ‘Xmas couch potato’ season, the first public version of this app has recently gone live in the Google Play store. You can download it today!

Under pressure…

The reality is that most adults struggle with balancing a busy professional life with the care that is necessary for spouses, children, parents, and friends.  The pressure is caused not only by increased stress to perform but also by cutbacks in public care services.  Childcare becomes more expensive every year. Someone has to take care of elderly and disabled family members. GameBus can help turn daily chores into playful family challenges. 

My island,  your island

Considering the landscape of health and entertainment apps, researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) observed that there were too many ‘social islands’, where children connected to Microsoft, Apple or Google ‘game centers’ to team up with ‘buddies’ in online games. They also observed that older people were teaming up with their peers for online puzzle games. At the same time other family members were online but interacting on yet another ‘island’.  

Pieter Van Gorp of TU/e says: “I use ‘Strava’ for biking and share the scores with my friends. My son uses Endomondo for his sports and my mother in law, loves to play Sudoku online. Can you imagine how great it would be to connect all these games in one over-arching layer where you can connect with your family members too? An additional layer would enable us to bond better.” 

GameBus connects family members and friends across the generations and across these ‘social islands’.  It allows you to team up with friends and family for challenges that cross the old boundaries of health apps. For example, GameBus allows you to play with your family and compete against your neighbours, younger children might score points for going to visit their grandparents, teenagers for going running and taking “social selfies”, or grandparents could gain points for solving Sudoku puzzles and walking the dog. GameBus assigns each task with a set score which are predefined by sponsors such as elderly care organisations (e.g., ZuidZorg). Why not stay healthy together?

Sign up now and try out the full version of the GameBus! Your live data will be hosted by company Synergetics.nl who aims to disrupt the current malpractice in personal data management. Their mission is to share the value of personal data back to the data producer. 

Next steps are for TU/e to continue to work with partners on further development and bring GameBus to market, powered by EIT Digital's Action Line Health and Wellbeing. More external apps will be added to GameBus, for example to track diet adherance, or the quality of the air where you are running. 

You can get the app from the Play store: goo.gl/mp7WBB. 

More info? http://www.gamebus.eu/
Contact: Pieter Van Gorp

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