Borderlands 3 bridges the gap between citizen science and blockbuster games

Published April 7, 2020

The Borderlands series has long offered players a chaotic loot scramble of explosive cel-shaded cartoon violence and intricately tuned shooting that leaves anything that isn’t the fun part on the cutting room floor. It’s like the gaming equivalent of a very large, very rich dessert — and what if, by eating dessert, you could also make the world better? Imagine.

Borderlands 3 publisher 2K and developer Gearbox Software is elevating the series’ latest game to lofty new ideals with a new in-game experience called Borderlands Science, a crowdsourced citizen science project that will leverage the hit game’s massive player base to conduct actual scientific research. In this case that’s mapping the gut microbiome — one of the most interesting frontiers in biological science right now. Scientists believe that microbes in the gut could play a role in everything from autism to allergies, though many of those mechanics remain mysterious and difficult to study given the massive breadth of microbes in the gut and the limits of computational power.

For players, Borderlands Science appears in the game as a retro arcade cabinet that will pop up soon on Sanctuary III, the game’s central starship. The mini-game itself looks like a colorful, Tetris-like experience, and if players don’t read the fine print they might not even know that they’re mapping microbes. Assuming that Gearbox’s normal ethos is on display here it’s also likely fun and addictive, though we haven’t yet tried it. And of course, players won’t be expected to engage with the project for the good of science alone. The mini-game will offer players special rewards and Vault Hunter skins to collect — a smart and natural way to incentivize players in a game that’s all about the pursuit of loot.

The undertaking is a partnership between researchers at McGill University, the Microsetta Initiative at UC San Diego School of Medicine and Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS), a project connecting video games with vital scientific research.

“We see Borderlands Science as an opportunity to use the enormous popularity of Borderlands 3 to advance social good,” Gearbox Software co-founder Randy Pitchford said of the initiative, calling it a “new nexus between entertainment and health.”

Gaming-focused citizen science is emerging as a fascinating way to pair the gaming community’s natural strengths — sustained focus, patience for repetitive tasks, intensive time commitments — with the needs of scientific researchers. Two prominent examples are EyeWire, which invites players to help map the brain’s neural networks and Foldit, in which users solve puzzles to map complex protein structures believed to have a role in diseases like HIV and Alzheimer’s.

Apart from a handful of exceptions — like EVE Online players mapping exoplanets — these citizen science games are usually browser-based, with more of an edu-science vibe than anything resembling the flashy hit games that drive the industry. Borderlands Science bridges that gap, bringing citizen science into the lucrative, bustling world of triple-A games. And if the model pioneered here goes well, the project could be an excellent example for other publishers and developers looking to weave real scientific good into their games in the future.

Careteam aims to unite patients and healthcare providers with a platform approach

Published June 18, 2019

How best to untangle the Gordian knot that is navigating your own healthcare? It’s a tricky question, and one that seems to have become only more complicated as technology improves, in many regards — systems don’t necessarily speak to one another, and it’s still hard for an ordinary patient without specialist knowledge to make sense of everything. Careteam is a Canadian startup hoping to address that, looking to replicate the kind of advances made possible by technology in industries like e-commerce and enterprise software.

Careteam co-founder and CEO Dr. Alexandra Greenhill has experienced the frustration of being a tech-savvy person in a world of healthcare that can seem technologically inept — both as a practicing GP and as someone who depends on the healthcare system as a patient and a relative of patients with more sophisticated medical needs.

“I spent more than 15 years innovating within the healthcare system,” Greenhill told me in an interview. “I computerized hospitals, helped doctors adopt electronic medical records and other types of innovation practices. And then for the last eight years, I’ve been in tech, trying to figure out how to build the kind of technology we need in health, and especially digital health.”

All that experience led Greenhill to the realization that while there were many companies building specific solutions for real, but relatively narrow problems, that didn’t reflect how most people experienced care. Greenhill and her team of three other co-founders (Jeremy P. Smith, Robert I. Atwell and Kevin Lysyk) had all had unfortunate, but eye-opening experiences with family members in need of treatment for major diseases.

“You step in and you discover that cancer care, palliative care, post-surgical care — there’s so many things that would have gone wrong if we didn’t have the expertise ourselves,” Greenhill said. “But in the meantime, you end up being sort of pulled into multiple directions and saying ‘this makes no sense.’ You know, I can purchase stuff online in my private life; I can use all kinds of tools in the business world, and yet it’s back to paper and voice in health, which matters most.”

Careteam CEO and founder Dr. Alexandra Greenhill

What Careteam provides is collaboration for care — true collaboration, designed to span patients, their doctors and other healthcare pros, their families and anyone who matters to them in the course of pursuing their care. It provides the ability to communicate instantly, build care plans that integrate all aspects of their tailored health plans, receive custom-configurable notifications and measure progress toward specific goals set by patient and healthcare providers.

Part of the reason this process has become opaque or difficult is precisely due to innovation: Greenhill takes issue with the prevailing narrative that the healthcare industry is somehow allergic to innovation.

“There’s this sort of perception that healthcare doesn’t innovate, but it’s also almost insulting to the healthcare system, because we have innovated — we save people from cancer, where we couldn’t,” she noted. “We cure HIV, in some cases, and we prevent it from being transmitted to unborn babies of mothers with full-blown AIDS and things that in my working lifetime were impossibilities; it was science fiction to help someone with HIV. And, and we’ve managed to do all of that, and it’s a success story. We’ve created complexity, we’ve created people who live with 12 conditions for many, many years and take complicated drug regiments.”

In addition to advances in treatment, Greenhill notes that she and her team couldn’t have build Careteam five years ago, because cloud storage wasn’t secure and everything had to be done on a site-specific instance, and that would’ve been cost-prohibitive to build. In other words, technology has been applied to, and vastly improved, healthcare overall, regardless of the general perception of the industry as an innovation laggard.

That’s why Greenhill’s startup doesn’t shy away from complexity — they embrace it. Careteam is designed not to try to normalize and standardize the varied and highly specialized landscape of healthcare solutions and providers through anything like a one-size-fits-all API. Instead, the company’s tech development is cleverly designed to be flexible when it comes to integrations.

“We collectively spent $1.9 billion in Canada, to try and digitize the healthcare system, create standards and create some exchange between data,” Greenhill said. “The NHS tried the same, big U.S. hospital systems have created their own little sort of islands, including Kaiser and Mayo and others. And the conclusion of all of that is standardization in healthcare just doesn’t seem to catch on.”

Careteam’s approach has been instead to integrate specific clinics, and let practitioners and patients derive benefits and help spur the adoption of the platform to their companion organizations and clinics. It’s a sort of rhizomatic approach that starts with a node central to a patient’s care and spreads through the healthcare professionals and members of the patient’s support network that the product helps. And integration is made possible without technical demands on the part of partners thanks to the work of CTO Lysyk, according to Greenhill.

The Vancouver-based startup is working with the Centre for Aging + Brain Health in Toronto, Ontario in a validation program announced last year, and also raised an initial round of funding in January led by BCF Ventures with participation from Right Side Capital, Globalive Capital, Atrium Ventures, and angels Barney Pell and Ajay Agarwal .