Joowon Kim ’07, an SMU Guildhall alumna living in Houston, is co-founder and chief technology officer of Oncomfort, an award-winning start-up that offers virtual reality stress-mangement tools for patients undergoing medical procedures and treatments. The company is now testing Kimo, a game that helps kids with cancer visualize the battle going on inside their bodies. “Kids can zap pretend rogue cells on their screens while chemotherapy takes on the real ones to save their lives,” writes Jenny Deam in a story about Kim and her company that was published in the Houston Chronicle on December 25, 2016. As Kim explains, “It is self-empowering. Instead of them just being passive and playing a game where they shoot things, it brings their focus back to what is happening to them. It makes it real.”
EXCERPT
Houston Chronicle
By Jenny Deam
The game screen is dark and creepy, just as a journey through the inner workings of a body would be with all those weird veins and organs floating around. Suddenly, a mocking, one-eyed creature pops into view, bent on destruction. It must be vanquished.
One shot and it is gone. But then there is another. And another.
That’s how it is in cancer and video games. The bad stuff just keeps coming.
Which is why two women, one from Texas, one from Belgium, joined forces to come up with an inventive way to let children with cancer visualize the fight going on inside them. Marrying the technology of virtual-reality gaming with medicine, kids can zap pretend rogue cells on their screen while chemotherapy takes on the real ones to save their lives.
“It is self-empowering. Instead of them just being passive and playing a game where they shoot things, it brings their focus back to what is happening to them. It makes it real,” said Joowon Kim, a 36-year-old computer scientist and gaming industry veteran.
Korean-born and now living in Houston, Kim is co-founder of a unique start-up called Oncomfort that offers virtual reality applications to distract, relax, and educate patients during difficult medical procedures. The products are being developed and readied for market through JLABS @ TMC, a life-sciences business incubator launched earlier this year by Johnson & Johnson and the Texas Medical Center.
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SMU Alumna Joowon Kim ’07: ‘Fighting Cancer As Child’s Play’
Joowon Kim ’07, an SMU Guildhall alumna living in Houston, is co-founder and chief technology officer of Oncomfort, an award-winning start-up that offers virtual reality stress-mangement tools for patients undergoing medical procedures and treatments. The company is now testing Kimo, a game that helps kids with cancer visualize the battle going on inside their bodies. As Kim explained recently in the Houston Chronicle, “It is self-empowering. Instead of them just being passive and playing a game where they shoot things, it brings their focus back to what is happening to them. It makes it real.”