Developed by the Games, Learning & Society program, and based on research by the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center, UW-Madison, Tenacity is a meditative app designed to promote mental well-being through breath counting. In Tenacity, the focus is on learning practices of wellness and self-regulation. Relax and concentrate on your own breathing as you explore Greek ruins, Egyptian dunes, and staircases that ascend into the skies, and unlock rewards and achievements as you become a more mindful person.
The work on Tenacity has also led to the development of Zenjuvo which takes the lessons from Tenacity and applies them toward an older audience. Designed for commercialization, Zenjuvo is an effort to move from R&D toward a fully fledged commercial product on mindfulness.
During this session members of the development and research time behind Tenacity and Zenjuvo will explain how the games have come to be developed, with a special emphasis placed on how a university spawned partnership is now attempting to move from research & development phase to wider, commercial, deployment of a game for health project. Thus, the session, which will cover ideas around using games to improve emotional health, is primarily a session about the trials of developing work that moves all the way through the hypothesis, prototyping, assessment, re-development pipeline with the goal of being a publicly available product on app stores worldwide in the next year.
