Diving into a decade of games for health research: a systematic review

Recent years have been characterised by a rising interest in using enter tainment computing to monitor, maintain, and improve human health. This is observed in many systems and applications that leverage the benefits of a playful and enjoyable experience to provide a technology-enabled health intervention. This paper reviews one decade of papers (679) published at the intersection of health, entertainment and technology to determine trends, studies’ characteristics, type of solutions, domains of application and study purposes. Results show that there is a growing body of research in the area, with the majority of studies provid ing solutions for rehabilitation and addressing motor conditions related to stroke and/or fitness. Where half of the solutions reported are custom made, the bulk of those studies is performed with the purpose of evaluating the solutions pro posed or validating their efficacy. In 80% of the cases, the studies are performed with subjects from the target population with sample sizes that have been steadily increasing over the years.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Healthy Aging through Pervasive Predictive Analytics for Prevention and Rehabilitation of Chronic Conditions

The current aging of the population is linked to many societalchallenges, especially in healthcare. Co-morbid chronic conditionsare prevalent in older age and drastically affect people?swellbeing, but they are difficult to study due to the many healthdeterminants involved. For this reason, we propose amultidisciplinary ICT-based approach for the prevention andrehabilitation of chronic conditions using unobtrusive andpervasive sensors, interactive activities, and predictive analytics.This framework allows fine monitoring of older people?s healthand improved personalized care for healthy aging. To illustrate theadvantages of this pervasive and data-driven approach we setforth a conceptual model, in which we use cardiovascular disease,Alzheimer?s disease, depression and falls as examples of commonco-morbid conditions in older people

Post-Discharge eLearning Platform for Cardiac Patients: Developing the Format of the Educational Units and Recording the Contents

Myocardial infarction patients face an increased risk of cardiovascular problems. This risk can be reduced by adjusting one’s lifestyle. However, once discharged from the hospital and faced with self-care at home the patient faces a loss of adequate information and diminishing motivation with time after infarction the event. There is a gap of two weeks between being released from the hospital and the patient having any chance of joining organised cardiac rehabilitation programmes, if these are organised by the health system at all. Unfortunately, by that time the highest motivation for lifestyle change has already been lost. An eLearning platform has been put forward to bridge this period, however, the content needs to be carefully prepared to educate and motivate the patient and their family. By analysing how health information is acquired over the Internet today, and by applying social-cognitive learning and storytelling into educational videos we developed a format of an effective educational unit. In order to develop an essential set of educational units seven interviews were recorded with members of medical teams and five with patients who had coronary disease, of which two were with their partners who were their informal caregivers. The format of the educational unit was designed as such that it can be viewed in 4-8 minutes and was composed of three videos featuring peer-patients and medical team members. The videos were accompanied by a short text of up to 50 words, illustrations or quiz questions. From the recorded video material 60 educational videos were edited and used to compose 20 educational units for patients with coronary disease. Legal issues regarding Rights of Publishing and General Data Protection Regulation issues were solved and backend data analytics was developed. Thus, the platform was prepared for next step which will be a large random clinical study

Design of a serious game in training non-clinical skills for professionals in health care area

International audienceMost educational games and training applications for health care professionals have been developed as simulation tools dedicated to the teaching of medical knowledge in a particular area. Non-clinical skills such as communication skills or knowledge about e-Health are insufficiently focused by such tools. A serious game with consistent educational objectives offers to the learner many possibilities to acquire multiple competences in a fun and engaging learning process. This paper presents a serious game composed with extensible educational modules that concentrate on providing high-quality health care knowledge. It is designed to respect the balance between serious and fun in both educational and game elements. The proposed architecture allows the learning objective to be clearly defined and facilitate the collaborations of actors involved in the development. A prototype of the communication skills module is presented as an example of a module design

A conceptual approach to enhance the well-being of elderly people

The number of elderly people living alone is increasing. Consequently, a lot of research works have been addressing this issue in order to propose solutions that can enhance the quality of life of elderly people. Most of them have been concerned in dealing with objective issues such as forgetfulness or detecting falls. In this paper, we propose a conceptual approach of a system that intends to enhance the daily sense of user’s well-being. For that, our proposal consists in a system that works as a social network and a smartwatch application that works unobtrusively and collects the user’s physiological data. In addition, we debate how important features such as to detect user’s affective states and to potentiate user’s memory could be implemented. Our study shows that there are still some important limitations which affect the success of applications built in the context of elderly care and which are mostly related with accuracy and usability of this kind of system. However, we believe that with our approach we will be able to address some of those limitations and define a system that can enhance the well-being of elderly people and improve their cognitive capabilities.The work presented in this paper has been developed under the EUREKA - ITEA3 Project PHE (PHE-16040), and by National Funds through FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) under the projects UID/EEA/00760/2019 and UID/CEC/00319/2019 and by NORTE-01-0247-FEDER-033275 (AIRDOC - “Aplicação móvel Inteligente para suporte individualizado e monitorização da função e sons Respiratórios de Doentes Obstrutivos Crónicos ”) by NORTE 2020 (Programa Operacional Regional do Norte)

Gamifying self-management of chronic illnesses: amixed-methods study

Background: Self-management of chronic illnesses is an ongoing issue in health care research. Gamification is a concept that arose in the field of computer science and has been borrowed by many other disciplines. It is perceived by many that gamification can improve the self-management experience of people with chronic illnesses. This paper discusses the validation of a framework (called The Wheel of Sukr) that was introduced to achieve this goal.Objective: This research aims to (1) discuss a gamification framework targeting the self-management of chronic illnesses and (2) validate the framework by diabetic patients, medical professionals, and game experts.Methods: A mixed-method approach was used to validate the framework. Expert interviews (N=8) were conducted in order to validate the themes of the framework. Additionally, diabetic participants completed a questionnaire (N=42) in order to measure their attitudes toward the themes of the framework.Results: The results provide a validation of the framework. This indicates that gamification might improve the self-management of chronic illnesses, such as diabetes. Namely, the eight themes in the Wheel of Sukr (fun, esteem, socializing, self-management, self-representation, motivation, growth, sustainability) were perceived positively by 71% (30/42) of the participants with P value <.001.Conclusions: In this research, both the interviews and the questionnaire yielded positive results that validate the framework (The Wheel of Sukr). Generally, this study indicates an overall acceptance of the notion of gamification in the self-management of diabete