Pam Omidyar created HopeLab to enable people to use games and other technology to improve their health and well-being. Below are excerpts from the organisation’s website.
You can discover more about HopeLab’s work, together with that of the Omidyar Group of which it is part, via the following links.
The Backstory
In the late 1980s, HopeLab founder Pam Omidyar spent her days as a research assistant in an immunology lab.
At night, after hours watching malignant cancer cells multiply under a microscope, she unwound by playing video games with her husband, Pierre Omidyar, the software engineer who went on to found eBay.
As a scientist and game enthusiast, Pam began to wonder if giving young cancer patients a chance to blast their cancer in a video game might actually improve their health.
In 2001, Pam founded HopeLab to develop and test this concept, which led to our first product, Re-Mission.
The Big Idea
Today we’re working to harness the power and appeal of technology to improve human health and well-being.
Re-Mission demonstrated that specially designed technology can be both fun and effective in driving positive health behavior.
Our work now focuses on the research and development of new social technologies to promote human resilience and improve both psychological and biological health and well-being.
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