Breathing Games
Breathing Games is a global open access commons promoting respiratory and mental health, and health commons.
History
The initiative started in 2014 in Montreal, as a graduate project to prototype games for children with cystic fibrosis. Doing a literature review and environment scan, Fabio Balli saw that many projects initiated by students, parents or researchers were useless as they were under copyright, and badly documented. With colleagues Yannick Gervais and John Danger, they agreed to work under open licences, and to provide the work done free of cost. After attending a hackathon held in a hospital, they contacted Sensorica to build a new device to measure the outgoing breath for respiratory phisiotherapy. Sensorica governance highly influenced Breathing Games.
To move forward with the projects, the team took part in a few hackathons, organized two at Sensorica, and moved to host "health game jams" first at Concordia University, then in Switzerland as part of the Lift conference and later Open Geneva, then in France at Necker Hospital. Team members also took part to residences, notably the OpenCare project in Milan and the Citypreneurs contest in Seoul. Collaborations were developed with researchers across these countries to validate and improve the games and controllers.
Breathing Games activities have been financed by public research funds (Canada, France, Italy, South Korea) and private foundations (Switzerland). Breathing Games main legal sponsor is the Breathing Games Association, registered in Geneva. The commons is a member of the WHO Global alliance against chronic respiratory diseases, and the Open Source Initiative.
Respiratory health promotion
The community develops open-source games for respiratory health, as well as open-source hardware to transform the breath pressure and flow into digital signal, using a creation-as-research methodology. The major outcomes are summarized in following presentation:
In 2021, Breathing Games presented further examples of commons for respiratory care.
Advocacy for health as commons
Since 2020, Breathing Games hosts advocacy activities to promote health as commons. The key event is the GHF Open Village, a joint initiative of the Geneva Health Forum and Open Geneva.