Digital Bamboo Lands Heart Healthy Game App

My doctor keeps nagging me to try biofeedback to manage stress flare-ups like throat reflux and stomach pain, which sounds intriguing and all, but who has time to hit a clinic and decompress for an hour a day? Now if I could only do it in the convenience of my home...

HeartMath LLC's HeartMath System may have part of the solution. It has you clip a sensor to your ear that in turn monitors heart metrics and provides visual imagery on a PC monitor to let you see how your state of mind (thoughts, emotions, stress) affects your heart and autonomic nervous system. HeartMath's actually been around for a while, but used in more of an educational and/or industrial capacity. Today's announcement adds interactive entertainment company Digital Bamboo to HeartMath's clientele, including exclusive worldwide rights to integrate the tech with massively multiplayer online games on both PC and videogame consoles.

Don't look for it in World of Warcraft or Dance Dance Revolution just yet, but Digital Bamboo's HeartWarrior, which already uses HeartMath's tech, is currently employed by Chinese Olympic sports teams, the Chinese version of NASA, and an 18-week sports-reality TV show airing on the CCTV News channel.

I'd love to see how this might impact the way gamers relate to a highly competitive and behaviorally violent video game. Would players moderate their behavior if, while hacking through hordes of hapless adversaries, the system cautioned their stress levels were peaking?

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