Treatment Program To Watch

"DLife" is considered a "time buy," in which the production firm purchases airtime from a network or station (CNBC, in this case) and provides the show ready-made with all advertising in place. Advertisers include Abbott Diabetes Care, which sells glucose monitoring equipment, as well as Atkins Nutritionals, Drugstore.com, Colgate-Palmolive and eight other firms.

Rideout said she has some concerns about the involvement of advertisers with a stake in the market for treating a condition.

"Issues of product placement and blurring the line between advertising and content is something where we have to tread very carefully," she said.

Steinberg said in an e-mail interview that sponsors do not influence the content of "dLife" and that the program needs their funding to distribute "a lot [of] good information for people with diabetes."

"We are not a creation of the pharma[ceutical] or device companies but a wholly independent entity that has found a way to better serve a community in need of health information and motivation," Steinberg said.

It is not uncommon for drug companies to back such projects.

Through a combination of funding from such companies and grants from the National Institutes of Health, Debra Lieberman, a media researcher and professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, helped develop video games for children and adolescents with asthma and diabetes. The games were sold to health care providers, who distributed them to children.

Video games with a "socially conscious" purpose are referred to as "serious games" and are attracting more widespread funding as their health benefits are assessed and proven.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation last year awarded a $250,000 grant to Digital Mill, a company involved in Games for Health, which encourages the development of health education games.

Lieberman studied edutainment video games' effectiveness at getting children to better manage their conditions. One subject of her research was "Packy & Marlon," an adventure game in which kids play the role of a character with diabetes whose condition they manage by measuring his sugar levels, selecting his food and administering his insulin.

In an analysis published in 2001 in the journal Ambulatory Care Management, Lieberman wrote that in several clinical trials, children and adolescents had reduced emergency and urgent care visits and learned about health and self-care after playing "health education video games aimed at asthma self-management, diabetes self-management, and smoking prevention."

Lieberman said video games are often the "last step of motivation" for children and adolescents reluctant to do the things they know they should do for their health. She thinks games could help adults, too, though that hasn't been studied much yet.