Playing a game on Facebook used to mean raising sheep and hens or shooting down enough thugs to rule the mafia in New York City. Fun, but not quite useful. Now, thanks to a collaboration between the Diabetes Hands Foundation and Joslin Diabetes Clinic, there's a more constructive way to spend your time: HealthSeeker.

The game sends health-minded players on daily missions aimed at eating well, managing diabetes, losing or maintaining weight, and reducing the risk for heart disease. Completing the tasks earns players points and may catapult them to a higher, more challenging level.

Here's how it might work: You log on to Facebook, enter HealthSeeker, and click on a new mission—say, Snack Attack. You'll pick three actions—in this case, each revolves around keeping snacking in check. During the day, your goal will be to complete the missions by eating edamame (green soybeans) instead of chips or grabbing an apple between meals.

"We wanted people to play the game but not be stuck in front of the computer," says Manny Hernandez, president of the Diabetes Hands Foundation, a nonprofit organization that connects people with diabetes and raises awareness about the disease, and a developer HealthSeeker, which was financed by Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals. "We wanted them to go out and do [the missions] and come back to the game."

When you log on to HealthSeeker again, you'll record all of the actions you've taken. Completing actions earns you points, and you can score even more by sharing your results with Facebook friends or tweeting them on Twitter. This sharing is a benefit of playing the game. A friend may even send you kudos—the game's version of a high five—for a job well done.

"If you have diabetes, you're charged with doing a lot. Having diabetes can be isolating," says Amy Campbell, MS, RD, CDE, manager of clinical education programs at Joslin Diabetes Center, who helped create content for the game. "[With the game,] you can get support 24-7. You get support from your friends. You can get recognition for doing a good job."

Kudos and badges (virtual medals for completing missions) are particularly motivating if you have a hard time with some aspect of diabetes management. "Those are ways for your friends to congratulate you," says Hernandez. "If you struggle with carb counting, if your friends see that you completed a mission on that, they can send a kudos."

According to Campbell, HealthSeeker provides necessary lifestyle coaching between doctor's visits. "It's this constant support, particularly from the Facebook community, in between when you see your provider," she says. "People need ongoing support with diabetes. Seeing a diabetes educator once or twice a year is nice, but it's not enough."

The support isn't just for people with diabetes. You can invite Facebook friends who don't have diabetes to play the game and cheer you on. "It becomes more fun if you have friends from your network playing it than if you're playing it on your own," says Hernandez.

The diabetes-specific challenges—monitoring blood glucose levels or connecting with other people who have diabetes—are optional, and the rest are applicable to anyone focused on living a healthier life.

"The lifestyle things you do aren't really diabetes-specific," says Richard Jackson, MD, a leading endocrinologist at Joslin who worked on creating the game. "If you're getting to the age where you're worrying about your health, this game fits for that, too."

Above all, the aim of HealthSeeker is to foster a healthy lifestyle for players through nutrition, exercise, stress reduction, diabetes management, and general wellness. "This game requires that you not just play the game in Facebook but that you live your life," says Campbell. "It's focused on making small changes."

To play the game, click here.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney   

The "Tu" means "your" in Spanish and the English-language site has a companion site in Spanish called EsTuDiabetes. TuDiabetes is aimed at all people touched by the disease while recognizing that Hispanic Americans have a higher rate of diabetes than non-Hispanics, said Manny Hernandez, president of the Diabetes Hands Foundation, which launched the site.

Today marks the start of a "data donation drive." People who join the site are asked to post their hemoglobin A1C values, a measure of how well their blood glucose is controlled. In type 1 diabetes, people have lost the ability to make insulin, which regulates blood sugar. In type 2 their bodies no longer make use of insulin properly. HA1C levels are checked by doctors every three or four months, offering a way to track current health among members who choose to participate.

TuDiabetes has more than 14,000 registered members who can choose to post their number in three ways. They can enter their HA1C number and see it plotted on a graph that only they can see, they can contribute that data anonymously to the site, which will add it to maps of their state and region, or they can also post it publicly on their profile for other site members to see.

The project, funded by a grant from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hopes to build on information sharing that already exists and use it to learn more about people's experiences and population-level issues than traditional research might allow, Dr. Kenneth Mandl of Children's said in an interview.

"The project is about consumer engagement," he said. "It leverages these emerging technologies around online social networking and specifically looks at the communities that are arising organically."

The Children's researchers chose TuDiabetes for its privacy protection, the non-profit status of the foundation that runs it, and its lack of commercial involvement, Mandl said. Sharing data is similar to the mission of PatientsLikeMe, a site founded by MIT engineers who had personal experience with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and wanted to spur research while sharing disease management strategies. The diseases on that site tend to be rarer than diabetes and the site has relationships with pharmaceutical companies, Hernandez said, both of which make it different from TuDiabetes.