Carnival Play

Developed within the scope of a SciTech research project, this chapter records in a procedural way the design centred on senior users for a set of three serious games for the eHealth field, designated by the authors as “Carnival.” The chapter, having as its leitmotif the project aforementioned, looking at its motivation, breaks down the systems augmented feedback interfaces—BodyGrip and SHaRe—to evaluate, rehabilitate, and monitor dexterity and manual strength. Topics related to empathy and well-being in the user experience design process, namely guidelines for empathy in different project phases, participatory design, inclusiveness, and amusement are identified. Withal listed the development phases of three games dynamics inherent to the “Carnival” set —“High Striker,” “Claw Machine,” “HotDog Sauce”—punctuating with the discussion and contributions to the e-health area describing its potential for Evaluate, rehabilitate, and monitor dexterity and manual strength.

Gamification in Dementia and Mild Cognitive Impairment

The following chapter will address the use of gamification (specifically serious games), as well as its results and conditions of use, as an assessment and intervention tool for people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia diagnosis. These games are effective for cognitive skills, such as attention, memory, executive functions, and speed processing. Besides this, physical (related to motor coordination and movement), social, psychological, and emotional (related to motivation, anxiety, depression, and stress) skills can be improved by serious games. It will be considered the contexts of the use of different games, such as Episodix, Panoramix, and some other games that are applied as serious games, like exergames. Besides, it will be also referred the different platforms associated with these games, such as mobile applications, videogames, virtual reality, and augmented reality.

Software Requirements Definition Processes in Gamification Development for Immersive Environments

The implementation of gamification in immersive environments is a complex and multidimensional process. A socio-technical approach is necessary to cover all the specifications that the system needs to satisfy the needs and the purpose of its genesis. The use of virtual reality (VR) technologies in mental healthcare associated with gamification mechanisms has been gaining popularity. Two projects were developed using VR, one that allows people to experience and better understand mental health conditions through empathy construct and the other can be used to help patients with social phobia or Arachnophobia to reduce their phobias using VR solutions and real-time biofeedback. The authors analyze the aspects that influence the development of immersive environments and gamification mechanisms and propose a socio-technical methodology based on actor-network theory for the survey and definition of requirements.

Gamification as Upper Limb Rehabilitation Process

In our modern life world, health and well-being strongly depend on the individual's health behaviours. Motivation is a major factor of health behaviour change, and intrinsically motivated behaviour change is desirable as it is both sustained and directly contributes to well-being. This raises the immediate question what kind of interventions are best positioned to intrinsically motivate health behaviour change. The current state of evidence supports that gamification can have a positive impact in health and wellbeing. In recent years, games and game technology have been used quite widely to investigate if they can help make rehabilitation more engaging for users. The underlying hypothesis is that the motivating qualities of games may be harnessed and embedded into a game-based rehabilitation system to improve the quality of user participation.

The Use of Gamification in Social Phobia

Social phobia usually starts in adolescence. Social situations that include meeting people, talking in groups, or in more specific situations are going to be avoided by individuals. Therefore, this condition has the consequence of significant impairment in different occupations. Recent studies show that gamification is commonly applied to interventions for the treatment of chronic diseases, and although there are interventions concerning mental health, these are few and there is evidence that these interventions have positive effects on mental health, particularly among young people. The desensitization therapy program using gamification consisted of 15 sessions: an initial assessment session, 13 biweekly exposure therapy sessions, and the last reevaluation session corresponding to a total duration of the program of seven weeks. Each session, lasting approximately 50 minutes, is followed a formal structure consisting of the following phases. The intervention focused on shaping appropriate approach behaviors through a process of successive approximations.

Structural Modeling and Analysis of Barriers Encountered in Gamification Applications in Health

Applications (apps) offer outstanding opportunities for healthcare services to serve individuals in areas that do not involve technology that improve healthcare outcomes, and that strengthen community health. These opportunities are becoming more common, especially with the increasing use of mobile devices in many segments of society. On the other hand, there are many obstacles that directly or indirectly affect the process of implementing gamification applications. In this study, the authors use Interpretive structural modeling (ISM) and MICMAC aiming to reveal the relations of obstacles encountered, and also to find the root cause of barriers in gamification engagement through applications used in healthcare. Findings showed that the lack of functionality of the apps, having the highest driving power and lowest dependency, was determined as the root barrier whilst other barriers are also divided into levels.

Fun and Games

Gamification is a relatively new approach that allows the use of videogame design techniques in contexts that are originally not game related, including for the promotion and education of health outcomes. Gamification has been used in many contexts, but healthcare practices, which include often boring, frustrating, or painful tasks, can especially benefit from the fun enjoyable games people play for entertainment purposes. Games can be helpful both promoting an increase in health knowledge and behaviors, as well as the positive emotions elicited by health-related contents and behaviors. This chapter begins by discussing the concept of gamification, the gamification toolbox, and gamer taxonomies and the different uses of gamification and game-based approaches in the healthcare context are explored, to figure out what the key success elements are and why this promising approach has yet to achieve its wide-spread potential use.

Why Gamification Is Not the Solution for Everything

Gamification is a very well-known design technique in software development that applies the principles of gaming to non-gaming contexts and environments to increase the user adaptation and engagement of applications. Examples of gamified applications can be seen across all kinds of software categories from health to finance, always with the same goal: provide a better experience to the end-user. This chapter reflects upon the user feedback of gamified applications, especially on health sector, and concludes that gamification is not a solution that can be successfully applied to every context. In the end, industry standard alternatives to gamification are analyzed in order to produce high quality non-gamified applications.

Gamification

Diabetes is a chronic disease requiring a strict management. MyDiabetes is a mobile application for type I diabetes management that, as other mHealth applications, faces the challenge of user adherence and motivation. Here the authors describe the application's redesign and the implementation of different gamification techniques to tackle these challenges. The transition to the current version of the application was made in two stages. The first addressed the redesign of the application and started implementing gamification techniques. The second stage improved some of the features and added others. After the second stage, a new survey was conducted to evaluate the implemented features and improvements. While objectives and incentives to increase the number of records were endorsed by 56.5% of users, health directed badges and objectives increased the acceptance rate to 91.3%. Long-term effectiveness of the gamification approach will be done in the future.

Nutrify

Generally, exercise and nutrition are the two ways to maintain a healthy weight. Most of the time exercise is given more importance over nutrition. However, nutrition is equally important or else it leads to malnutrition which is of major concern in many of the African and Asian countries. Through this chapter, the authors attempt to understand the reasons for lack of knowledge about nutrition and help in designing solutions using gamification to alter nutritional behavior. The chapter discusses malnutrition causes and provides an overview of recent gamified developments to promote nutrition and reduce malnutrition. Few online and offline interventions is proposed by categorizing people into adults, children, and teachers. Finally, octalysis is performed on the presented solutions to get an idea of used and unutilized coredrives/motivators and modify for better gamification experience to improve nutrition.